What If Aging Isn’t Inevitable? The Science of Regeneration, Stem Cells & The Future of Human Health

Welcome back, Synergy listeners. Today's conversation is one that will completely challenge the way that we think about aging. Aging isn't simply about getting older. What if it's actually about the result of breakdown, disconnection, inflammation, and the loss of communication within the body? And what if the body was designed to heal, to adapt, to regenerate far more than we've been led to believe? So today we get to be joined by Dr. Ian Whyte. He's a PhD who has been working in this regenerative space for many years, and he's in the process of writing a book, The Unified Theory of Life, and it's going to change the way we think about aging. This conversation is going to go far beyond wrinkles and lifespan. We're going to talk about cellular communication and the things that truly drive aging. This is one of those episodes that may completely change the way you think about your body and maybe even your life. So Lori, I know in your practice in The Villages, you have been seeing, you know, the aged population for quite some time. And I've been in practice for 20-plus years, 24, 20, 23, 24 years in the functional space. And my patients are starting to age, right? I'm starting to see patients in advanced age that I didn't see before just because they've been with me for so long. And so I'm excited about this conversation. I know that you're excited about this conversation. Is there anything, Lori, that you want to walk walk away with today from Dr. White as you, as you think about your patient population?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is not just me walking away today, but people walking away from this today feeling very excited that age chronologically is one thing, but biological age is something different. And you are not a victim of your age. It— you have the power to change it. And so I— that's what I hope to walk away with, is that our listeners today feel really excited about what they have the potential to do as they get older. So, and I'm just excited to have you on here today. I don't believe in accidents. I got the chance to meet Dr. White at a local event where we were talking about some really cool things on the horizon in stem cells, stem cell biology. I'm just going to say that because I'm just intrigued by the fact that you are a stem cell biologist. Like, that to me was just intriguing all of its own. But just being there that day, um, to me really opened my eyes and got me so super excited about what's on the horizon. So I was just thankful to be there, thankful to meet you, which led to this conversation and some others that we've had. So thanks for joining us today. I know you're super busy, super, super busy with all you have going on, but you took time out of your schedule. So I just want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts that you're here today sharing your knowledge.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Yeah, for sure. So give us a little bit, like, who's Dr. Ian White? Tell us about your story.

Yeah, well, first, before I do that, I wanted to answer the question that you were also asked. It's like, what do I hope that you get out of this and what do I hope the listeners get out of this? And that is hope, right? That there is an answer. There are options available. It's not just this inevitable decline that once you feel the ravages of aging that you're stuck with it forever. There are strategies that do exist. So Really, whenever I go on the stage, whenever I talk about aging and regenerative medicine, I try to communicate hope that we are not just talking about a wrinkle cream. We're actually talking about ways that can be practically applied to make you feel better and to give you a better healthspan. You know, we may not be increasing your lifespan, but perhaps if we can influence your healthspan, which means, you know, those last 20, 30 years of your life are at a higher level of quality, then, you know, that's certainly something to achieve.

Thank you.

About me, well, I've been studying regenerative medicine and longevity for many, many years now. I actually started as a parasitologist in England. I received my undergraduate degree and I went straight into studying parasites because I was very interested in how the immune system works with these organisms that seem to find a way to live and thrive in this very hostile environment that's inside our bodies. And over Over the years studying parasites, what I found was that they have these very potent abilities to manipulate our immune system using what we didn't know at the time, but we know now are exosomes. So these exosomes, which if you're familiar with this area of regenerative medicine or longevity at all, is a very big buzzword right now because it's one of the modalities that we're able to utilize in order to modulate inflammation. And if you're familiar with the term inflammaging, you know that inflammation is one of the main drivers of aging. And so by, you know, in a very interesting sort of convolution, if by studying parasites, I was introduced to the idea that we could manipulate our immune system in a way that could benefit us as it does the parasites. So the evolution of my research went from parasites to the immune system, and then from the immune system to the birth of the immune system, which are stem cells.

Yeah.

So immune stem cells. I studied stem cells for many, many years. And then the natural evolution of that was to say, okay, well, if stem cells are repairing our body, what's causing the disrepair? And that's where I started getting really interested in the aging process, what drives aging, why we age, and what we could possibly do about it.

I love that. So when we think about aging, most people expect decline as they age. That's just part of the thing. So how would you talk about that for patients that have that perspective?

Yeah, well, through our entire history, we've seen family members, members of the community age and pass away. It's quite a strange experience for me as a 50-year-old now seeing movie stars that I watched as a child being old age pensioners. It's a very sort of strange experience because when you're young, you just feel like everybody's young and whoever was old was always old. But there's this inevitable decline that we're seeing in ourselves and in our friends and family. And we just sort of get used to that as a natural process of life. You're gonna get gray, you're gonna plan for retirement, and that's the way of things. But as a biologist, what we see is that aging is actually something that can be negotiated with. Mm-hmm. So in our species, we're somewhat isolated in the mechanisms by which we age. But there are many other species out there that we study as scientists that have uncoupled biological aging from chronological aging. So I, I often talk about species like the Greenland shark, which can live for over 400 or 500 years in the ocean, and they don't even become reproductively mature until they're 150.

Wow.

Wow.

They gestate—

I want what they're having.

Right. Well, that's why we're interested in those species. But they gestate their young for 18 years. So if you have that sort of timescale in your lifespan, you're obviously doing something very different from a biological perspective than perhaps a mouse or a dog or even a human. These giant turtles and tortoises, sorry, that live, you know, for 200, 300 years. You know, they're obviously doing something very different as well. They're not just living in the ocean. These are terrestrial. They live on land. But by far one of the most interesting species is a species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii, and it's also known as the immortal jellyfish.

Mm-hmm.

And what that does is that after it's born, it matures, to sexual maturity where it's able to reproduce. And then it says, you know what, I've had enough of being adult, I like being a kid. And so it dedifferentiates back to a baby, back to a polyp. And it just keeps doing that over and over again. So it will be a polyp, a baby for a while, and then it will start maturing again and become an adolescent and then an adult and a reproductive adult, and then it will dedifferentiate. And so some experts believe that we have jellyfish in our oceans today that were born over 5,000 years ago. And the only reason they die is because of disease or predation. They get eaten. But they don't actually age. So when I learned things like this— I'll give you one other quick example—

lobsters. Lobsters, yeah, I read that.

Yeah, and there's a species of carp called the buffalo carp. They just keep growing. They don't show any biological signs of aging. In fact, if you took a buffalo carp at 100 years old, you wouldn't know that it was any different than a 1-year-old other other than the fact that it was much larger, but it reproduces exactly the same. It has the same biology. There's no degeneration. And so what I was learning from these species is that you could uncouple biological aging and chronological aging. And there are mechanisms that exist in nature that don't break any fundamental laws because it— we see it, we see it existing where you can keep a system, a biological system, a body intact for many hundreds of years when other species don't? And that question there was sort of what drove my research. Why can these guys do it and these guys don't? What is the difference?

So what is the difference, right? Perfect lead-in. So what is the difference?

Well, that's the multi-trillion-dollar question, right? That's what all the gerontologists in the world are trying to understand. And I believe that I've got a bit of a handle on that compared compared to some others in the industry. It's a very complex question. Maybe the best way to sort of try to introduce it is to talk a little bit about evolution, if that's not going to be too shindy. Yeah, I like that. OK, so the underlying root cause of aging is often described by some as just an accumulation of damage. You mentioned that you're reading David Sinclair's book. There are other gerontologists out there that have similar ideas about the idea, let's say, an automobile. You drive an automobile for enough time and it just accumulates enough rust, enough wear and tear on the tires and the brakes that it just doesn't work any longer. And that's a perfectly good analogy, you know, and it seems to fit because when we look at a person, we seem to be wearing down, you know, similar to an automobile. And in David Sinclair's example, he talks about a CD. Yeah. So for his aging hypothesis is that we lose information, our DNA becomes damaged and it becomes, post— it becomes modified by a series of markers on the surface that prevent certain genes from being expressed and then overexpress other genes. I don't quite see it that way. I see that as the symptom of the aging process, but not actually what's driving aging. So what is driving aging? Simply, it's physics. Mm-hmm. Physics is what drives aging, and specifically it's entropy. And I know that's going to sound a little bit confusing, but let me try to explain that a little bit. So at the beginning of time, when, you know, at the time of the Big Bang, there wasn't really much around. We had the Big Bang and everything was very ubiquitous. It was, you know, atoms and— sorry, it was protons and neutrons and not much really existed, but everything was homogeneous.

It was all the same.

But then over over, um, you know, millions of years, we had events like coalescence where you started creating actual chemicals— helium, hydrogen, and other more complex chemicals. Those started to form, uh, nebulae and, and, and planets and, and, and suns and things like that. So the complexity of the early universe started becoming less complex, and it's, and it's continued to do that over time. So when you have the Earth form, let's say, after, um, you know, millions millions of years of this coalescence of matter, because that's what entropy is. Things just have to sort of come together and happen. You go from a state of complete disorder and you have to become ordered. That's just how physics works in this system. You start getting early molecules that form on Earth, but those early molecules are subject to entropy just like everything else. So they're being bombarded by radiation. The heat was very high. So those early molecules that formed were ripped apart very, very quickly. But then over time, what we ended up seeing— we didn't see it, we assume it— molecules started figuring out ways to protect themselves from the environment, and the environment became less abrasive. And so we got sustainability of these molecules. But again, they're subject to entropy, they're subject to the damage of their environment, so they had to start developing ways to repair some of that damage. And if we look at early bacteria, for example, one of the really interesting ways the bacteria bacteria solved an aging problem was that when a bacterium was getting old, so all the molecules inside the cell were starting to become oxidized or they were getting damaged by radiation, they would have to absorb fresh molecules that were just freshly made. So that's low entropy coming into the cell. I hope that I'm not getting too complicated. So you've got a cell with aging stuff in it and now it's feeding itself with new stuff with low entropy. And so the analogy, if we're thinking ahead, is that we eat food, that food is low in entropy, but we'll get there later. So it's taking in these new molecules that are not oxidized and not damaged. And then when it divides, what it wants to do is not divide equally. It wants to make two daughter cells, but it wants to put all of the bad junk in one and keep all of the fresh molecules in the other. And so then you have two— Cells. Distinct bacteria, this one dies with all the junk, but this one has all of the fresh material. So you've basically just de-aged that bacterial cell. Now take that all the way forward through evolution and we get to multicellular organisms. We're still under the same physical pressure. We're still bound by the second law of thermodynamics. We're still experiencing entropy. Our cell— our molecules oxidize. Our cells become damaged, we accumulate junk. And so what do we do? We make these senescent cells where we're able to remove the junk. We defecate. So we take all the dead and dying stuff in our body and we remove that entropy from our body. And then we take in low entropy in the form of food. So we're taking in these unadulterated molecules, we're making new cells all the time, and then we're getting rid of the junk.

So— Wait a minute, time out. So a standard American diet— is a standard American diet low entropy?

We are going to get to that because, yeah, we're going to get to diet for sure because that's a very important, um, very important question. Um, so just to finish that thought, yes, so, um, our bodies over evolution have figured out ways to battle against the accumulation of damage, of the buildup of entropy. However, it can never outpace the buildup. And in fact, the reason is, I believe, that we've evolved to work with entropy, to work with this buildup of damage in order to have an off switch. So, in order— if you have an evolving population and there's limited resources, so there's so much food to go around, you want to keep evolving, but you can't evolve new individuals to compete with the resources of the old individuals. So, what you need is a switch to turn the old ones off and get rid of them, to open up the resources for the next generation so that the species can keep evolving and improving and getting better in the environment they find themselves. And so I believe that aging was actually evolved by certain species as a way to get rid of those that have already tried reproduction to make space for those who are becoming reproductively mature.

I would say as a perimenopausal female, that's what it feels like.

Being unfairly removed.

It's like, when you get to perimenopause, we're done with you, so get out of here. We're tossing you right out. I'm tossing you right out.

Yeah, that seems to be the biology.

That seems to be the biology.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah. Well, I think about evolution and adaptability being in the same conversation. And I mean, is that true? Like, as ourselves evolve, we also have to adapt to our surroundings and that.

It is— Yeah. Well, as Charles Darwin said, the species that's the most successful isn't the strongest or the fastest. It's the species that can adapt the best. So we have to be adaptable. And if we can't adapt, we can't evolve and we won't be able to survive because our environments have changed dramatically over millions and millions of years. And if we're not able to adapt to those new environments, then we just perish. We just disappear from the map. And millions and millions of species over, uh, the course of evolution have disappeared because they couldn't adapt. Um, and, uh, the reason why we're here today is because we were very adaptable. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So what do you see as the key lifestyle factors that improve one's chances of having a greater biological age? Like you said, not living longer, but living longer, better.

Yeah. Well, so that's a very good question, and it's a very tough one to answer. But what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to answer it from the perspective of things we know you can do today sort of thing. And then also why biologically and from a scientific perspective, I have some ideas about what should be done as well.

Yes.

So we know all the time that we are constantly exposed to environmental factors that are bad for us, right? So we have heavy metals, microplastics, we've got all of these endocrine disruptors that we are constantly exposed to from BPA plastics and the non-stick on your frying pan. All of these things disrupt disrupt our endocrine system and cause everything to be out of whack, which makes us age faster. But also, we're in a situation now where we have this chronic overnutrition. We just eat all the time. Food is just naturally abundant everywhere, and we just eat and eat and eat. And that leads to persistent insulin signaling and mitochondrial dysfunction, increase in reactive oxygen species, mitochondrial dysfunction. All of these things where, you know, some science demonstrates that a calorie-restricted diet is actually very good for you because you're able to mitigate and reduce a lot of those things. You know, if you, if you're constantly eating, you're constantly activating mTOR, which is a growth, growth factor, and that causes a lot of issues. And that's why rapamycin has been, or was thought to be, a promising antidote to aging because it turns off the mTOR pathway. So rapamycin is a huge sort of name in the anti-aging industry. It doesn't seem to have the benefits that we thought it might. But all of these things, you know, contribute. But one of the, you know, anxiety, that's another thing. You know, we're constantly in a state of fight and flight. You know, we're constantly stressed. We're not sleeping properly. We don't get enough physical activity. You know, that just the muscles are a bioactive tissue and they release hormones and chemicals that affect the body. And if you're not exercising and moving your body, You're atrophying your muscles and you end up, you know, experiencing the downside of that later on. But one of the worst things that we do is we consume sugar. Sugar is absolutely one of the worst things. It's actually the— probably the most toxic thing we put in our body. And people consume it all day, every day, often without knowing about it. If anybody could do anything about their health, you know, right now, the first thing and the easiest thing they could do is just to cut out sugar from their diet. Table sugar, even the fructose from fruit, unfortunately, is bad for us. You know, everything in moderation. You know, we get a lot of nutrients and vitamins from fruit, but the sugar— fructose is particularly bad. It cross-links proteins in our bodies, and we get these things called AGEs. It's just funny that it's called AGEs, but it's an advanced glycan endpoint. And what that means is that your proteins, especially your collagen, why you feel stiff in the mornings, is cross-linking with these sugars and it can't be undone. And once it's locked into place, that's it. If you have a tissue that doesn't turn over, like your collagens in your body, then it's going to be there and it's just going to keep getting worse. So, you have to cut out sugar. But when we talk about sugar and when we talk about preservatives and all the junk in the American food diet, we go back to this whole idea of entropy. The reason we put preservatives in food is to prevent them being broken down by microorganisms, right? But then we, we lock up the nutrients, so we make it very hard on ourselves to digest as well. And so then we, we're chronically malnourished even though we're constantly eating. So we're taking in all these ages, we're taking all this this high entropy food, because when you, when you take a burger, let's say you put it on a flame and that browning that forms on the top, those are the AGEs that I'm talking about. Those are the cross-linked proteins and sugars that we're then putting in our bodies, which are incredibly inflammatory. So toast, biscuits, anything that's baked, you know, in a dry heat will form these AGEs. We're constantly consuming them. And then with all the preservatives that are in the food as well, we're not absorbing the nutrients, so we become malnourished and we eat more. So we just keep putting more of the junk in our bodies and that's what's driving the obesity problem in the United States. It's not just a caloric imbalance as a lot of nutritionists would say, it's actually the fact that we're consuming so much junk that we can't use effectively and it's causing inflammation. So obesity in the United States is really an inflammation issue. Mm-hmm. It's a chronic inflammation due to due to the preservatives and the sugars that we consume all day, every day.

I know what I require.

Yeah, that's right.

I was going to say that too. Yeah. Overfed.

What?

Overfed, undernourished, eating way too much sugar, not moving enough, inundated with pesticides, herbicides. And then we talk about hair care products, skin care products, lack of air filtration systems, poor water.

They're all full of phthalates in the perfumes and shampoos and everything we use, very inflammatory, very bad for your health and your aging.

Yeah.

And not to mention, like you said, the pesticides and everything that we're constantly exposed to as well. So these are all environmental things that we have generally very little control over, but if we're aware of them, then we can start doing things about it. So avoiding heavy metals because heavy metal accumulation is a very bad thing. Microplastics, so drinking out of metal or glass bottles instead of plastic. You know, these are things that I don't know if you know this, and I don't know how accurate this is, because I've never actually really looked it up. But I've heard it many, many times that we can consume the equivalent of a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Like, I don't know how that's possible. But, you know, I was thinking about that the other day when I was making pancakes for my kids using a plastic spatula.

Spatula.

And I just peel, I I just, you know, as I sometimes do, just peel off some plastic that's coming off and throw it away. And I thought, wait a minute, what if I'm not getting all that? What if that's going into the pancakes and they're consuming that? I mean, they must be, right? And so it's just plastics are everywhere.

Think about the clothes that we're wearing too. I was challenged recently with looking at plastics and I'm like, my clothes are plastic. Like, this is all polyester stuff. We're absorbing some of that through our skin too.

Look at the dust around your house. You know, I try to keep a very clean house, but there's still, you know, always gonna be dust. Most of that is, dead skin from your body. But a lot of that is also from the fabrics that you wear, the microplastics. So you're inhaling that into your lungs all day, every day.

So, Dr. White, you mentioned a strategy that I want to go back to, and that is fasting, because I think fasting is one of the number one, the least expensive tool that we have in our toolbox that we could be utilizing. But I think oftentimes our bodies are so stressed and undernourished that sometimes it can backfire. So knowing when to use that tool, how to use that tool, how to fuel properly so that we're not creating more of a micronutrient deficiency or enzyme deficiencies or other body burdens. What would you say to that?

Yeah, well, and I'm not a physician, so I can't give any medical advice, of course. Sure. But if you're constantly putting inflammatory products into your body, you're going to be under constant inflammation, which is going to drive the aging process. So it's not just about the preservatives, which are very inflammatory, and it's not just about the sugar sugars, which are incredibly, probably the most inflammatory thing you can put in your body. But it's also the fact that genetically certain people are, have intolerances to certain foods. And so it's a really good idea to not only necessarily restrict your caloric intake, but also make sure that you're not consuming the foods that cause you inflammation. And you can get blood panels for that to figure out whether you're sensitive to certain food and you should consider avoiding them because anything you can do to reduce your chronic inflammation, and everybody that's listening to this right now is experiencing some form of chronic inflammation, whether it's from environmental factors, from food, or from parasites. Maybe more people than realize it have parasite burdens that are causing inflammation. So, all of these things you can have tests for. So, if you're interested in your longevity, consider reducing how much you eat. When you do eat, eat low entropy food. So, one of the chapters in my book is called Eat the Sun. And obviously, you can't physically eat the sun, but the sun is the lowest form of entropy in our solar system. It's the lowest form of energy. We can't utilize that energy, but plants can. And so, if the plants are taking that low form of entropy and they're turning it into material that we can consume, that's the lowest form of entropy that we can have access to, and that's what we should be consuming. So uncooked raw fruits and vegetables are a really good source of low entropy. So that means proteins and peptides and molecules that haven't been adulterated by reactive oxygen species and damage, rusting, the equivalent of rusting. So if you're going to eat, which you should, eat low entropy foods and eat a diverse set of foods as well. So instead of eating a whole lettuce, eat a mouthful of lettuce, a mouthful of mouthful of carrots, diversify because the exosomes and the goodies, the micronutrients that are present in those are different between different species of fruit and vegetable. And so it's a good idea to diversify yourself and take those in. If you're going to eat meat, again, I prefer to eat raw meats like sushi and things. But the problem there is you've got the heavy metal contamination risk and things like that. Right. That there are alternatives. If you're going to eat steak, which I love, do it rarely. Do it once a month, or don't eat it every day. I have no interest in giving up the things that I love to do. I smoke a cigar when I'm on the golf course. That's not good for you. I love to drink whiskey. That's not particularly good for you. But I love to eat steak, and that is not good for for you. But what's the point of having this, you know, long, high-quality life if you're not going to enjoy some of these things? But just don't do them all the time. Keep the calorie restriction low, eat low-entropy foods. Eggs, great example of low-entropy food, you know, in addition to fruits and vegetables. And then exercise and sleep. Those are the easiest things that you can do that cost basically nothing. And I'll tell you one more thing that costs you nothing. I don't know how many —people on this call will have the ability to do this because there are age restrictions. But donating blood is actually a demonstrated way to remove the junk that accumulates in you. So these AGEs and all this other stuff that you can't excrete, you can't get it out of your body, it just keeps accumulating. When you donate blood, that blood is useful for a trauma patient, but it also gives you the ability to dump all of that entropy that's accumulated in your body. And then your body makes new blood cells from all the eggs and vegetables that you've just eaten. So you've just replenished yourself. So that doesn't cost any money. And I know that they don't allow people to donate blood over a certain age. But, you know, our ancestors weren't stupid. There's a reason why— and there's a couple of different reasons why— but there is a reason why they used to bleed people with leeches and other technologies. It's been proven to bring people out of stupor and bring people into a sense of vitality when you remake your blood, when you get rid of the toxins out of your blood.

As for As practicing medical providers in this area, I love right now that we have the ability to bridge the research and science with the practice. You know, Kelly and I in our practices, having been doing this for quite some time, one of the things we tell our, our clients is that there's not one standard way of doing things. You know, like diet by definition is what we feed ourselves on a daily basis to nourish ourselves. Right, to generate the energy that we need to live. And we don't subscribe to a single way of eating. There's so many things out there, right? You know, follow this diet or follow that diet. The reality is, is throughout the seasons of our lives, as we adapt, change where we're at, our body needs different things, right? And so, you know, we think about like fasting, although it has great data, there's— for women and men, it's different. different. When they should be doing that is different. So I really appreciate that you went back and said, you know, listen, I'm not a, I'm not a medical provider, I'm a science— I'm a scientist. And this is what I'm saying is this is what I see. And I love that perspective. I love having conversations like this for that very reason, because we've got to be able to bridge that gap, right?

That's right. And I want to go back to the food sensitivity testing because that is one of the big tools that we use in helping patients patients define an anti-inflammatory diet for themselves. A lot of times, once a year, especially if they've had a chronic illness, we do encourage them to do a pretty extensive food panel to have a designer way of eating that decreases their overall inflammatory burden. So I'm, I'm so happy that you brought that out. But another way that we have been able to pick up on food sensitivities is wearables. So wearing a continuous glucose monitor or wearing an Oura Ring, where we can either see changes in blood sugar that aren't relative to carbohydrate intake, but like that food creating an immune response, creating an elevated blood sugar temporarily, could be a way of picking that up. And then also elevation and heart rate.

Yep.

Sometimes with the Oura Ring, we'll see elevation and heart rate happen with the food that is a healthy food, but for that person, it's creating an inflammatory response. So there are many different ways to assess your body and determine foods that may be reacting, um, in your body that may not react in someone else's body. So I'm a fan of that.

I think the more information we have, the better we can design a lifestyle that decreases inflammation and makes us feel better.

Well, that's really one of the main differences between healthcare today and healthcare when I was young, much younger, when my parents perhaps were my age. We have more agency over our healthcare. Previously, we were just passengers and we would listen to our physicians who were using the information they learned at medical school. But nobody in medical school was taught regenerative medicine. Nobody's taught anti-aging. Aging. In fact, the CDC doesn't even recognize aging as a disease. And so, you know, today with the access to the internet and also, you know, biohacking and, and the ability of scientists like myself to be able to come on a platform like this and talk, uh, the average person is able to gain access to figure out what they can do themselves to improve their, their journey instead of just, um, taking a physician's word for it, um, who may not fully trained in longevity and regenerative processes. So anybody listening to this call today has an advantage over anybody from a few decades ago.

I have so many questions. Like, we could be here all day long. So do you think that aging should be classified as a disease?

It is a disease. It is a disease. So we spend $5 trillion a year. Just take a second to let that sink in. $5 trillion a year treating the symptoms of aging. So arthritis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodegeneration, all of these things are just expressions of aging. We don't really see that in the young population unless there's, you know, we always have outliers, of course. But really all of these things are a symptom of the aging process. So at my company, NeoBioScience, What we do is we study upstream. We study the aging process. If we can study that as a disease and understand how to treat and potentially cure aging, then all of those diseases that are currently consuming $5 trillion a year could evaporate, could go away. You know, we, we already have products on the market that can help with arthritis. You take these, these, these products. I'm happy to talk about the, the science behind those if you, if you're interested. We can put those in the body and the body is sort of tricked into thinking that it's young again and it heals like it did when it was, when it was a baby. And so we, we're able to tap into this idea that we can uncouple biological aging from chronological aging that we saw in all these other species. And we can trick the body into thinking that it's chronologically much younger than it is. And then we affect the biological aging as a result.

I do wanna get into that because that's so interesting. But I think about our, our listeners that are aging, right, and they have gotten to say 65, 70, 80, and they're like, "I just wanna do what I wanna do." Yeah. "I don't wanna change. I don't wanna eat better. I don't wanna move my body. I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to." And I'm like, this is the time you have to double down. You know, aging is not for sissies. And if you want to live well, function well, be well, there are certain things that you kind of have to double down as we get a little bit older. Would you agree with that? Do you think that's— Oh, yeah.

—practical? Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets, all right?

Yeah.

Until my research gets funded and I find the cure for aging, we're not going to have a silver bullet. But if you don't want to feel the ravages of aging— and because they're going to get faster and faster and more severe as time goes by— you have to do something about it. There's nothing else you can do other than get off the sofa, get out there and play pickleball, move around, just do some gardening. You know, I'm relatively young still. I don't have a lot of free time to go to the gym as I used to. I used to be a long-distance runner. I haven't had the time really to do that. So I do other things. I'll try to get out and go fishing for a couple of hours, or I'll go into the garden and I'll do some weeding, but because at least I'm moving, you know, it's not, you know, the resistance training that I should be doing. And everybody on this call all should be doing some for. Again, I'm not a physician, but I do recognize the benefits of resistance training to build up that muscle mass or maintain the muscle mass because muscles are such a biologically relevant tissue in our body as it ages. So yeah, you've got to do something about it. Now, I did say there's not a silver bullet, but there are countermeasures that can help. And so for example, my father is in his mid-70s. Now, he's been dealing with severe osteoarthritis of his hip for some time. Time. You know, he doesn't really sleep through the night because he's got to shift his weight all the time because of the discomfort. And so we've developed a product over the past few years, which is derived from umbilical cords. So we take the Wharton's jelly, it's like this cushioning material inside an umbilical cord. When the baby's born, it's, you know, happy, it's a cesarean section, and we have this medical waste that's normally thrown away. We can take that, we can render it, we can take that cushioning product and inject it into a hip, which causes this separation of the joints. It causes a cushioning, but it's also, um, an analgesic. It reduces the pain. It's also an immunomodulator, so it reduces inflammation, and it's also pro-regenerative. So while we don't have a lot of data on this right now, what we do believe that we're seeing is that we're getting a regeneration of the cartilage that's missing from that joint. Again, we don't have a lot of supportive data on that right now. That's what we believe is happening. But my father came over just recently. We went to a physician that's trained in regenerative medicine who injected this product into his hip. And 3 days later, he woke up after the injection and said, I just slept through the night for the first time in years without any cane. And then he's, you know, he's been walking around the house without his cane. And they went back to England. And he's still pain-free right now. He's on the hip replacement waitlist in England at the moment. And right now his physician is calling us saying, what did you do? Because I've never seen anything like this. It's not magical. We're using biology against itself, or for itself, I should say, not against itself, for itself. We're taking these young signals signals that we had when we're young and we're fully competent of repair and regeneration. We lose that over time. That's why we get older. But what we can do is we can go back and grab those signals. And I've shown this in my research. I've published on this extensively, and I won an award from the American Heart Association for this work on cardiac regeneration, where we take these young signals, we give it to an older individual, and we actually allow them to repair as if they were when they were young. Wow. Younger. So taking all of that repair potential that we lose when we're adults and giving it back so the body repairs itself. It says, okay, I know what to do. I know how to repair myself. I've been doing this for 80 years, right? I know that I— when these cells die, I've got to replace them. The problem is I just can't get to it as fast anymore. I'm running out of stem cells. I'm running out of signals. But when you give those signals back and those raw materials, the body knows exactly what to do with them and it's able to repair.

Yeah. So where do peptides fall into this conversation? Because I believe that, and I was just curious if you've seen them used simultaneous to treatment modalities like you're talking about right now.

Yeah, all of this is used synergistically. So, you know, I'm not a peptide expert, but I do take peptides and I do see peptides used extensively in this field.

Yeah.

Nothing is used in a vacuum. Nothing is used exclusively. You see things like red light therapy because of course we're bombarded by blue light and artificial light all the time. We're not getting the types of wavelength of light that we need in our bodies. And so there are therapies where you can actually expose yourself to red light. There are therapies where you can take certain peptides, which are small fragments of proteins that we're missing in our bodies. I'll give you an example, claw chlorophyll. Chlorophyll, if you look it up, is a, is a very big name in, in anti-aging right now because it's been demonstrated to have anti-aging effects in mice. But that translates also to humans. That's one of the few things that does translate from mice to humans when we talk about aging research. Um, and if you are aged, your levels of chlorophyll are very, very low. If you have CKD, so if you have chronic kidney disease, your chlorophyll levels are very, very low because your kidneys make it. And so you age faster, and that's one of the reasons why you end up dying. But if you can supplement back that chlorophyll like, like when you were younger, you can heal like you were a teenager or even younger. So these, these products, peptides, we call them, you know, a lot of people refer to what I do as stem cell products. They're not stem cells. They are are exosomes and regenerative secretomes, or Wharton's jelly. They generally do not contain any stem cells, but they have all the signals that your endogenous stem cells, so the stem cells that are throughout your body, need in order to facilitate repair. So it all works together. Reducing sugar, exercising, sleep, hydration, peptides, regenerative medicine. All of these things give your body the resources and the tools they're giving. Your body wants it, it needs it. You're not giving it to your body. All you have to do is give it to your body and your body knows what to do with it.

Yeah. So other than exosomes, are there things that we should be doing on a daily basis? You mentioned red light therapy, but are there things that we need to be doing to stimulate or to regenerate our own stem cell utilization for repair?

Yeah, so again, sugar is very toxic for stem cells, so cutting out sugar. Red light therapy is, is certainly a very good option because it activates our endogenous cells to proliferate and to differentiate. I wouldn't do exosomes every day. It is a modality that's available, especially if you're injured. You know, Aaron Rodgers received an Achilles heel tear a couple of years ago in the NFL, and they were injecting our exosomes into his Achilles so that he could heal faster. We're just providing the raw materials the body needs in order to heal itself. He's an older, you know, he's in his 40s, he doesn't heal like he would when he was in his 20s. So you're giving these modalities back, but anything that you're chronically missing, so peptides and hormones are very, very important. If your hormones are out of balance, your body is out of balance, your immune system is out of balance, and it's just racing to the end. It's trying to keep up, it's trying to understand what's going wrong. So it's burning through material, trying to solve a problem that it can't solve. So if you give the body the resources it needs, if you balance the hormones, if you give the peptides, if you supply the appropriate wavelength of light, get outside, take the sunglasses off and get some, you know, full wavelength light into your eyes, not for extended periods, don't look at the sun. But you know what I mean? Yeah. All of these things give the body the raw materials and tools it needs to heal.— it always has known how to heal. We lose 300 million cells a day— a minute, sorry— just doing what we do. That's why we have so many skin cells. That's why there's so much dust around. We lose cells all the time throughout our entire body. The body's repairing all of the time. But if you don't have the resources, it can't keep up with the damage. And that's why we see this exponential race towards the end.

So that's why— yes, I want to go back to something you said, that we, I heard and we kind of skimmed over, but earlier you said that as we get older, that's gonna speed up. Yeah.

Right?

Yeah. And I wanted to go back to that because that's why I feel like we have to be so repetitive, so loud about that it not being a, you know, if we leave leftover time to do the things that are most important to us, we're gonna get leftover results, right? And as I work so hard, with— because of my clientele, I have a lot of 70s and 80-year-olds, and I tell them, and I've seen this, you know, in the 60s, your body's still a little— it's still a little bit forgiving. Still a little bit. 70s, far less. You hit 80, I tell them, if you are not in active pursuit, like on full speed to be doing the things, then you are in active pursuit of dying. Like, there's no stability here. So I feel like that's what you say is that speeding up. And I wanted to go back to it just because— Yeah. Because I wanted to understand why you were saying that.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just coming up with this analogy off the top of my head. So forgive me if it's not a particularly good one. But imagine you've got a barrel and there's a leak at the bottom, you know, but that the weight of that barrel is keeping everything, your structure together, it's like balanced on something that's balancing everything else out. As the water is leaking, that structure is becoming more unstable because the barrel isn't doing its job. Once it's empty, everything just falls apart. So if you can keep topping it up, or if you can stop that barrel from emptying, then you're going to keep the surrounding structures more intact. And that's the best analogy I can come up with off the top of my head. But, you know, we're losing all that, we're losing the race. As soon as you're born, you're dying. I think that was an Iron Maiden song or something. But it's true. So the science actually backs that up as well. When we're talking about entropy, the ability to shed entropy increases while we're developing. But as soon as we're born, we have— we see this precipitous drop in our ability to shed entropy. We lose it again at puberty, we start losing that ability, and again at menopause and andropause. So andropause is the male version of, of menopause, as you know. And then again in our late, um, in our mid to late 60s. So there's 4 periods in our life where the accumulation of entropy accelerates, which is pushing aging faster. So we experience it when we're born, when we're going through puberty, when we're going through menopause, and in our— in mid to late, uh, '60s, aging accelerates. So if you're not doing the things that can mitigate that, like sleeping, exercise, peptides, regenerative medicine, um, reducing heavy metals, toxins, inflammation— if you don't take anything away from this at all today other than the word inflammation and how that affects the aging process, then you'll be fine. Inflammation drives this more than anything else. Reduce the inflammation in your body, you're going to see that, you know, you're not going to see such a precipitous increase in the aging process. It's going to happen until we understand the biology of aging better, which is my job. That's what I'm doing. I'm studying aging to try to understand and get to the fundamentals. But in the meantime, don't allow the faucet to be open full. Close that faucet off. Stop the weak, replenish with all the things that you're missing, the klotho and all those other things that you just can't make when you're older like you did when you were younger.

I love it. Thank you so much for not only your time today, but your contribution to science. You know, we need you doing what you're doing to help us understand better as clinicians so that we can take this to the bedside and help our patients live and function their best. So thank you.

It's my pleasure. That's, uh, you know, I see this as my, you know, my, my, my, my gift and my curse because all I can think about is how to push this field forward because I, I see it as a solvable problem. We just need the funding and the resources to be able to do it. So that's where we're focusing our effort. This is by far the most important thing I've ever done in my career. And I think it's the most important thing to study in biology because if you can slow or pause the aging process, you take away so many different diseases and you give people so many options and quality of life.

Yeah, quality of life. So if you would let us, we would love to have you back because I think we had a few hooks today of things that we really need to be talking about, um, understanding, like, really differentiating what truly is a stem cell because we know about the talk out there, and then what are exosomes and those types of things, and what is the science behind all of that. Um, you know, our goal is really to keep an informed person And we really were part of that in our individual clinics. But with a platform like this, our reach is far greater. And we want smart consumers of healthcare. We believe that people are the CEOs of their health, and it takes education from the right people, not influencers, educators, right, to do that. So again, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for being here today. We'd love to have you back. Before we go though, is there anything that you can share? Like, how do people get in contact with you? What are— is this book out? When is it coming out? Is there anything that you would like to leave what would you like to leave our listeners with that they can hear more from you?

Yeah, great. Thank you for that. Well, I can be found on LinkedIn. I'm happy to provide a, a link to that. Also, our website is neobiosis.com where we have some very basic information, but we also have a cosmetic brand out. So all that science that we're studying when it comes to the aging process, we've been able to derive a couple of products that we think helps the aesthetics and cosmetics cosmetics industry. So we have LiliumPure.com, which is a product that we're working with right now. So those are the two main areas. My book isn't out yet, but I will be attending A4M in December in Las Vegas. I don't think I'm speaking this year. I usually speak every year there about the aging process, but I don't think I'm speaking. But we do have a booth. So if anybody wants to meet up, I'll be in Las Vegas. in Las Vegas the 11th through 13th, I believe it is, of December. It's a great anti-aging conference, regenerative medicine conference. So if there is an appetite to learn more, that would be a great resource for anybody.

Well, thanks again for all you do for supporting us as clinicians, as well as just your work that just is supporting our listeners. So take care of yourself this weekend. Have a good one. The Synergy Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor-patient relationship is formed. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE]