Micro-nutrients as a Biomarker of Wellness

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Well, hello to everyone joining us today on our podcast. You're listening to the Living to 100 Club, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. If you're looking for inspiration about your future and staying positive when hit with setbacks, you're in the right place. We're here to help you get the best out of all the years we are given, regardless of what obstacles come our way. From my articles and podcasts to our club membership, I want to invite you to join our community and stay uplifted about aging and keep a positive mindset in all you do. Today's podcast, we're talking with Dr. Hans Parge about wellness, prevention, and youthful aging. Specifically, we explore a new biomarker that reflects a person's health age by measuring the presence or deficiency of micronutrients in the body. First, a little background. Dr. Hans' background is in biomedical research and pharmaceutical drug discovery. His basic training is as an X-ray crystallographer. He did his PhD at Trinity College in Dublin and postdoctoral work in Berlin at the Free University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. His work at the Scripps was on the atomic structural analysis of proteins, the molecules of life. In 1993, he joined a startup company that pioneered structure-based drug design in the pharmaceutical drug discovery process. In 2009, Dr. Hans moved into the world of wellness, prevention, and youthful aging. He now helps people take control of their health and age by design, with the goal of dying young as late in life as possible. Hans, welcome to our program today.

Thank you, Joe, for having me, and it's an honor to be here.

Great, great. Glad to have you with us. I always like to open our conversations by asking the guests to tell us briefly about the journey that brought you to where you are today.

Like all— what did they say? Life is not a destination, it's a journey. So the, um, the little detours in life make it really really very enjoyable. And I've had a number of little detours that have sort of brought me into the world of my career, and, um, and I really enjoyed that. I mean, it was one particular person who I met in Edinburgh who turned me on to the world of big protein structure analysis, that turned me on to a gentleman in, in Berlin where I did an EMBO fellowship, and that turned me on to the Scripps Research Institute, where I then spent about another— from '86 to '93, about 7 years doing wonderful work. And then another person turned me on to Agaron Pharmaceuticals, which was a local company that sort of pioneered that structure-based drug design and, and helped me live the American dream. You know, stock options are a wonderful thing when you get into a startup that's successful.

Sure.

And, um, yeah, so that— I guess I'd rather be lucky than good.

Yeah. Well, that's a, that's an interesting journey, and we all take different pathways, don't we? So do you consider yourself a research scientist, or what, how do you describe your current profession?

So that's a great question, Joe. I've been struggling with what I call myself for all of my life. I guess I, I could call myself a commitment to the art and science of clean living and useful aging. That's what I have become. And I believe over the years that, you know, like we all do, that we have more fun when we serve people, where we have more satisfaction in feeling that we have actually contributed something to the community that has left a little legacy, a little mark. And coming from Ireland, the land of saints and scholars where my education is, I joke I've got German genes and Irish temperament and an American live-free-or-die approach to life. And of course, you know, the land of St. Patrick, um, it has always been known for the land of saints and scholars, for their, um, their role in saving civilization when the Huns, my forefathers, ravaged and burned their way to Rome, and also bringing back civilization into mainland Europe by founding the monasteries that brought back the literature. So yeah, I mean, I consider myself a servant.

Yeah, that's quite a heritage, the Irish heritage. So when you and I spoke, we talked about the current state of medical care, and you commented that it's not really medical care, it's sick care. It's not healthcare, it's sick care. Help us understand why you say this.

It really does I mean, I'm not— this is not a thing that I've come up with. There are many, many good people that have already commented on it. There's a wonderful video called Escape Fire that shows the dire straits of our sick care industry and points a direction into the world of wellness that will happen, is happening. It's called anti-aging because that makes it sexy so people can spend more money on it. But basically it's just wellness and prevention. And no, it's— nobody's at fault. If anything is at fault, it's our, it's our, it's our human behavior. You know, that is, we're fine. We're all fine until we're not. And if you look at people that really have a very consciousness-based approach to their health, most of them at some very young age had a brush was a life-threatening, you know, socially acceptable disease that helped them rebalance or reprioritize their appreciation for how fragile the miracle machine is. Now I think what— so basically we built a system and now we just need to build another one because you don't fix the system, you know.

Well, right. It's the— it's the addressing the sickness, the disease, rather than addressing the prevention. I think that's what you're getting at. We focus too much maybe on, you know, treating the diabetes, treating the heart disease, treating all of the other chronic conditions that we encounter with age, and not enough is spent on really preventing these conditions and creating the lifestyles, as you talk about, creating the lifestyles, the preventive measures. That allow us to postpone or avoid these diseases altogether.

I agree, and I think it's also because we're not really willing to pay for prevention. I've been in this world now for 12 years, and I joke, my health, Joe, is none of your business until I get sick, and then, Joe, please give it back to me for free. That's the approach. I mean, we cannot expect our medical professional to do wellness if they can't keep their practice open because they can't monetize wellness. That's why it's called— I think some reason why it's called anti-aging and why I believe also the, you know, the interview with Chase Manhattan's analysts calls the anti-aging industry as the next industry disruptor and the disruption will happen in sick care. I mean, look at what happened in the last 18 months with COVID I mean, it was, it was really testing that system, so much so that we had to shut down our whole economy because our, our emergency room couldn't deal with, with the, uh, with the volume of patients.

Volume of patients, that's right, that's right. So let me jump into this specific topic I want to address, and that's the notion of biomarkers And when you and I talk, there, you know, there's a number of biomarkers that kind of reflect our current health age as opposed to our chronological age. So help our listeners understand, what is a biomarker? What is it used for?

There have been many conversations at many nutritional conferences and many, you know, for, uh, publications and discussions around what would be a good biomarker of a healthy diet. Because, Joe, it's not rocket science. If we eat right and we keep fit and we sleep well, we will likely live long and die quick.

That's—

and we all know that. The problem is what I said before. We all feel fine until we don't. So we need some kind of measure objective measure of where on that continuum of fine we actually sit. And, and having a biomarker read out our nutritional health, or are we getting enough vegetables and fruits in our diets? I think most people will agree, and there's many studies and they all have the same, the same output. Your average American has 2 to 3 servings of fruit and vegetables per day. And since they think potatoes and ketchup are fruit, that's a very sad state of our nutritional health. So having a biomarker that measures nutrition objectively, which are these plant molecules called carotenoids, I think is, is a godsend. It certainly changed the way I look at my diet.

Okay, so carotenoids are now measurable you told me, with a new scanner.

You've always been able to measure them in serum, but this resonance Raman detection of skin carotenoids means that you can actually detect them now in your skin, which means they've made it through the whole system of digestion to their target tissue, and that is a probably one of the first examples of so-called biophotonics, using light to measure my biomolecules way back in the late '90s at the Institute for Biomedical Optics at the University of Utah, where it was used to see if you could measure noninvasively these carotenoids in the macula, because you're not— which is that tissue at the back of the eye, which, which we see with, without which we won't see. —so, and you can't biopsy that tissue. So the physicist Gellermann and his partner McClain showed that you could, yes indeed, measure concentrations of these important eye carotenoids without—non-invasively.

So let me back up just a bit. Is carotenoid, the measure of the nutrients, micronutrients in the body, is that a biomarker In the same sense that cholesterol level is, or triglyceride level, blood pressure?

I mean, those are different metrics, but to the extent that they, that they measure risk, they are. I mean, so meta-analysis will show that, you know, that people that have a high level of these serum carotenoids have a lower risk. For bad stuff happening, which means that these people just have a healthier diet. I mean, we know, we all know this. The thing is that having an emotional response to the actual value is really what's needed in any kind of lifestyle change. Because again, we are struggling with fine. That is a very dangerous word.

Okay, so it is a level of risk that we're looking at, and higher carotenoids in the, in the system is lower risk?

So there are, there's a publication that came out in 2010 that shows exact, that makes exactly that point and proposes a carotenoid health index. The company I partner with that owns the technology, we are not in the medical field. All I will be prepared to say is that it measures objectively your consumption of vegetables and fruits. That's all I will say. And then I will point out to you the various different— many different studies that show that people that have a healthy diet that's rich in that kind of color are healthier.

Healthier, right. Because you're not making— you're not drawing medical inferences.

No, I'm not making medical inferences at all. Sure. Yeah. Okay. And then the concept really for me is, you know, I mean, I take multivitamins. I didn't take any multivitamin until I had my own measurement 10 years ago because I figured I would just get it from my diet, which I wasn't because my diet wasn't that particularly healthy. I mean, I wasn't overweight. I have a French wife, so we eat good French food because the French think bad food is a crime and so it should be. Should be considered a crime. But, but really, I did not score very well. So, but having, having that multivitamin, multi-mineral, which we all lump into the description of supplements, which to me suggests something optional, is very different to what the Germans call the supplements. They call them nutrition completing substances. Oh, okay. Which actually then suggests that a priori there's a gap. Yeah, there's a gap between what you're giving it and what your body needs, and you better make sure you fill that gap. I don't care how you do it, but you better make sure that you fill the gap. And that filling that gap, I would even call that your health insurance. And don't confuse it with what you're calling health insurance now, because that is sick insurance.

Yeah, it's a, it's a different— you're saying the same thing. I mean, supplements versus nutrition. Completing substances. Yeah, that does have a different emphasis. It's not like you're doing something wrong or something missing, but it's just there. Yeah. So is this, um, is this the nutritional competence that you talk about? This is really measuring what we're really looking at.

Yeah. So, so again, it's just by inference. I'm measuring your, your, your, um, the amount of fruit and vegetables you have in your diet. And as, as human beings, there's lots of stuff that we need that we don't make. We don't make iron, we don't make the minerals. Yeah, the vitamins are cofactors for many, if not all, of the enzymatic reactions that make life happen. So if you have a score that shows you've got a high dose of these things in your system, the inference is that you're probably also nutritionally complete. And it comes back to a wonderful paper in 2006 that really, I think, makes the best argument for making sure you are nutritionally complete, which is Bruce Ames' triage theory that basically says— that proposes that age-related diseases are really a consequence of a lifelong marginal micronutrient deficiency that has forced the body to triage or to rob Peter to pay Paul. You know, Paul being the person, the thing that's responsible for health now, and Peter being long-term health. And I don't think that our— that, you know, we've done a very good job in the confusion that we've created around nutritional completeness, our medical industry, because that's not what they focus on. I'm not paying them for wellness. I'm paying them for sickness. But if I go to a doctor and he tells me, ah, you take the vitamin or not, no big deal. You know, a healthcare practitioner, I would say, quoting Agatha Christie, who has no doubt, is not a healer. He's an executioner. And they all struggle like myself with the Dunning-Kruger effect, that their ignorance is dangerous, and they're not willing to even admit that they're ignorant.

So if we are nutritionally deficient, it sounds like it's not easily correct. I mean, if we're talking about a lifelong process, is that true? Is that—

I would say you can always come back to— you can always come back to being nutritionally complete. Like for instance, if you, if you're coming up to the cold and flu season, I mean, it's— the body is an amazing thing. You've got all these T cells wandering around like these, like these nomads in your system that once they encounter a foreign virus or antigen, they will recognize and then signal the nucleus, we need more of me. They need to then to make more of me, make more of more T cells. You need to replicate DNA. To replicate DNA, you need the enzyme called DNA polymerase. And for that enzyme to function, you need zinc. This is very simple. You need about 11 mg per day of zinc. So it's probably best to have that 11 mg before you're coming down with a cold.

Before it's needed. Yeah. Yeah, so if we are deficient, or let's talk about this scanner. The scanner can detect that level in the palms of our hands, the micronutrients that—

correct? It just— now remember, the scanner is only measuring that biomarker, those carotenoids, those phytonutrients in the palm of your hand, right? Yeah, because it— because they have a so-called a resonance Raman signal that the scanner can measure.

Okay, so how do we interpret the findings? What's normal? Is there a normal cutoff?

Is there— so the range, it's sort of a color range. It goes blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and it goes from blue is optimum, green is good, yellow okay, you know, and orange weak and poor is red. So the healthy diet starts at blue, which is probably calibrated on to maybe 5 to 9 servings of fruit and vegetables per day. You're not overdosing. It's not like, let's— let's say one carrot is good, let's have 100 carrots a day. I mean, that's not the point. Yeah. And those constant— or those color ranges actually reflect very well with the concentration ranges that were put together by that paper that suggested a carotenoid health index. Okay. So when, let's say you're getting like me, you get a score in the, in the, in the red. Well, there are factors that influence the score and they are your diet, the supplements you're taking, the stress you have in your life, and how much weight you're carrying. Because if you've got more weight, then they are diluted. So I had a choice to change my whole, you know, diet and my weight, which was already okay, and my stress, or, you know, get a, get a good pharmaceutical-grade nutritional regimen in place. And I took what was easy, and that's what I've done now for the last 10 years. And my doctor tells me my blood work is exquisite and my regimen appears to be keeping me ageless. Now that's for me, you know, I'm not making any, any promises that it will do the same for you, but likely it will do it for most people. My desire is just that people get the information, Joe.

Yeah, just to get the information, then we can do with it what we choose.

Yes, exactly. And the choices are really their life. You know, I remember a friend of mine who told me, I'm finally happy to be working on real diseases and not lifestyle-induced medicine. —on lifestyle-induced diseases, which is basically what you're talking about diabetes, and if it's— unless it's type 1, you know.

Yeah, so it is another measure. I had a physician on last week who talked about metabolic health. He's a cardiac surgeon. He's talking about these other metrics, and they're very significant as we already mentioned them, you know, the triglycerides, the blood glucose level, cholesterol and blood pressure and waist circumference, these 5 metrics, he said that they collectively are a composite of our metabolic health, right? And we have high levels of health and we have metabolic syndrome, which is more serious. So this is another measure, this is another, but it's non-invasive.

It's non-invasive, and the difference is, you know, for me as a nerdy scientist, we often cannot see the wood for the trees. Sure. And I would call it a holistic health biomarker. And the doctors are always, I mean, and rightly so, they are focused on, let's say, the one thing that we need to fix. I'm thinking, guys, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. Give me the whole picture because my blood work was exquisite. I had an overall good pattern. It did not include measuring that biomarker of the carotenoids. But my carotenoid score, my skin carotenoid score was down in the red, like the check engine light red, I would call it. And I did not know that. So, you know, it is— so it's very interesting to talk to physicians because really, like myself, they're trained to deconstruct, the deconstructionist approach to science. Which is, you know, let's, let's take the watch apart. And as we put it back together again, we will know how it works. The miracle machine, unfortunately, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So let's get a holistic read and then not become a condition because the real physician will trigger a relaxation response. Just by his being able to ask the right questions and to calm the patient down. What I see more and more happening now is that physicians need, as Monty Python would joke, the machine that goes beep and the patient becomes a condition that they are trying to fix. There's that wonderful book by, by Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response, you're probably familiar with.

Yeah, yeah, so this level, carotenoid level, is another measure and it's, as you say, it's easy to observe all of these status in isolation. It's easy to separate out, but what you're recommending is that we really need to collectively look at all these functions. As you say, your blood pressure was fine but your micronutrients level was, was down.

So, and I would even add to that, Joe, is that what we need, we need an emotional response that will trigger an aha moment to change our lifestyle. And that's what I love about this particular measurement, because irrespective of who you measure, they will have an emotional response. I've measured, you know, fitness people who are really fit, they've got 13-inch biceps and they score very bad and they say, wow, this is not a machine, this must be wrong. So that's an opportunity for them to educate themselves as to, as to what the difference is between fitness and health. Yeah. So it is, I think that's where I love the machine because it sits at that interface, the emotional interface between science and emotion and action.

Is it any different from getting a reading of high blood pressure?

Well, I mean, the only difference is it's not a medical device. It's not meant to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate any disease. The only difference I think would be that you should have no fear of it because it's just like your weighing scale.

Yeah, but it doesn't always create that aha moment and the decision to make a change, just like obesity. Well, you're overweight. Okay, I should lose weight. Well, okay. All right, looks like your micronutrients level is is low, what are you going to do about it?

Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, nothing is 100%, sure, but only 20% of us really take control of our health. The other 80% either don't care or they have an early death wish. So at least to get a few more people aware— I mean, as I said, I am not in the convincing game. My desire is to just create that awareness, sure.

No, I think it's an important measure, and I think it's extra information to help us make those informed decisions. You know, the more informed decisions we can make, the better off we are. So is this, is this measure available?

Can we get it from our doctor's visit? Some doctors that are partnered with me in San Diego have it. One in La Mesa and one in Rancho Bernardo, and then another one in the Hoya area. There are, if you go onto the website, there are ways to actually find, putting in your zip code, who are the doctors that have it. Great. But they can always connect with me and I'm happy to, I have my own device that I use as part of my business. I'm more than happy to connect them to, whether they be here or whether they be in other parts of the world or other parts of America. I will always make my best effort to connect them to people local that have a scanner. What is it called again? What type? It's called the Pharmanex biophotonic scanner. P-H-A-R-M-A-N-E-X. Pharmanex biophotonic scanner.

And do you have a website where it's available, or people are better off contacting you directly?

It's best if they just contact me. There is a website that It takes a little bit of navigation, but I'm more than happy to direct them to that site.

Do you know if insurance covers this as a procedure?

No. No, it's not. That, I think, is another one of my pet peeves. Yeah, of course. What better place to spend your money than on your health? Yeah. Much better to spend it than on your sickness.

Well, we'll cover the heart surgery, but we're not sure about— Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So can a person buy this on his own and keep it at home?

Yeah. No, they can actually, they can buy the device for themselves. And that, that I can also help them with. I would, I look at it as an in-home, you know, holistic wellness bio-device that can, you know, that can, that can connect all the family. I mean, I, we're even now starting in January, our little team has decided to do, inspired by the Irish Tidy Towns competition, to start the Healthy Neighborhoods Project, which will use the device to measure people's progress on a 60-day challenge, which starts January 1st, which is the day we spend most money on salads. Yeah.

That's good. Yeah. Now, how often do you recommend these readings be taken? Because that's something I'm guessing that changes just after a week of changing your diet.

So every 30 days we lay down a new layer of skin. So that's when, and that's where the, where we are, we're measuring the concentrations in the stratum corneum. So I would recommend, and for my clients, I measure them every month. And there's going to be— there are going to be fluctuations. Some clients that I don't measure every month, they fall off the wagon and they get back on the wagon very quickly once they see their score go down. But yeah, a monthly basis is recommended. And people that are on our regimen, they get a free scan then every month.

So a low score presumably means eat more fruits and vegetables. Can we add these supplements or these nutrition complete products?

Absolutely. And I sometimes wonder, I mean, I'm not going to make any quality judgments on supplements out there, but if you're scoring low and you are on a multivitamin, then, then a multi-mineral phytonutrient supplement, it obviously is just not formulated to give you that particular protection. So, um, you know, it is In the early days, people would say, you know, how do you know your supplements are working? I tend to be— I tend to dissect a little bit more.

So it won't tell us what we're deficient in necessarily, potassium or iron or whatever. It just gives us a composite. Exactly. Which makes sense. Sure, sure.

Yeah, I mean, it's— I didn't know until today that you need 11 mg per day of zinc. Sure. And I look at— I really look at the multivitamin as my insurance policy. That's what I look at my health insurance. The other thing I pay, you know, Medicare and pay my UnitedHealthcare, I look at that as my sick insurance.

Sick insurance, sure. And I have to pay it monthly.

I have to pay both monthly.

Yeah. Yeah, but it's easier to pay the health insurance from that perspective. I think.

And I think there, you know, somebody once said to me, the things we hate spending money on the most is the things we need to spend money on the most. I hate spending money on sick insurance. Sure. And I do dislike my automobile insurance, but there's just no way around it.

So how can people contact you, Hans?

So there is that link to your Holistic Academy which has my number. Uh, but, uh, do you want me to— do you want me to put the link in here, or do you—

um, no, I can put that in the announcement. Sure, yeah, sure.

That same page of yours, that same page, it has my— has my email and has my telephone number.

Okay, happy to do that. So before we wrap up, what would you like our listeners to take away from this conversation?

It's all fixable. It's all fixed.

I mean, it is whatever it is, but it takes that mindset. It takes a commitment.

It takes a commitment. It takes the mindset. As you said this morning, you know, we have to plug in the mind to say, oh no, well, it's all over now anyway. There's no point in worrying. There's no point in doing anything. Hope is the last thing to die, but there's always hope.

Yeah, no, I think that's good. That's reassuring that really helps to create that sense of determination. It's fixable. It's no matter where we are. Yeah, yeah.

And those people that know fix it earlier, because ignorance— I, I tell people, ignorance is not bliss, it's a powerful tyranny, and hell is the truth learned too late.

True. Yeah, yeah.

But I know now Had I known 25 years ago what I know now, or had the scanner been available to give me actionable data when my doctor told me at age 40 I should take a supplement and I told him, no, I'll take it from my diet, that would be different. I would have aged differently. Sure.

Yeah. And we know successful aging doesn't start in our 70s. No. It starts in our 30s and 40s. Yeah.

And as George Burns said, if I'd known I had lived this long, I would have taken better care of myself. But I mean, I mean, the trick, Joe, is to really, as Ashley Montague says, is to die young as late in life as possible.

As old as possible. Yes. Right.

And do it quick. My other friend calls it rectangularize your survival curve. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, die.

And stop. Sure. Yeah, that's good, that's good. But it's all fixable. That's, that's the reassuring word. I like that. Well, it looks like we're out of time for today, Hans, but before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners about a few items. I'm pleased to announce a co-sponsor for this podcast, A Mighty Good Time. Are you looking for ways to stay engaged and stay active? Check out amightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 50 and over. It's free to search and it's free to post. Amightygoodtime.com. Also be sure to visit my website and see the option to work with Dr. Joe— that's me— for one-on-one conversations about managing setbacks, overcoming a negative outlook, and getting back to feeling engaged and motivated again. Visit the Work with Dr. Joe page on our website, livingto100.club. You can also pick up a copy of my book on Amazon, Living Longer Is the New Normal. I think that whatever age we're at, inspiration and a positive mindset can be put to good use. That's my message in the book. And be sure to sign up for our email list for announcements and newsletters with reliable information and resources about moving forward. And while you're there, you can download a free copy of my 9 Tips for Living Longer, loaded with practical and useful strategies for successful aging and staying positive. Hans, thanks so much for being a guest on our podcast. I'm sure our listeners enjoy this and will continue to enjoy it down the road.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, you're very welcome. And thanks to everyone for tuning in to this episode. Hope to see you next time.

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