In this educational video Dr. A, an integrative/naturopathic physician with over 30 years of experience, explores how the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway can be modulated beyond the classic prescription drugs rapamycin (sirolimus) and everolimus. He first frames mTOR as a natural, dynamic cellular signaling hub that balances growth (driven by nutrients and insulin) with catabolic processes such as autophagy. He explains that pharmacologic inhibitors (rapamycin, everolimus) partially suppress mTOR activity but do not shut it down, and that they are used clinically as immunosuppressants and in oncology. He then broadens the discussion to non‑drug strategies: (1) behavioral/nutritional approaches—fasting versus feeding, insulin regulation, and the amino‑acid taurine, which acts as an mTOR inhibitor; (2) cardiac glycoside drugs like digoxin, originally derived from foxglove, that also modulate mTOR; (3) a suite of botanicals and nutraceuticals that have been shown in pre‑clinical or clinical studies to inhibit mTOR, including resveratrol, EGCG (green‑tea catechin), honokiol, curcumin, quercetin, olive‑leaf extracts, hesperidin, the Salvia species Dan Shen, and ginsenosides (e.g., R1). Dr. A emphasizes that these agents do not “turn off” mTOR but rather shift the balance toward a quieter, autophagy‑favoring state, which may be beneficial during chronic inflammation, post‑injury healing, or cancer support. He notes that references will be provided in the video description and invites clinicians to a CE webinar on the topic. The video concludes with a call to subscribe and a preview of future videos that will dive deeper into mTOR’s mechanisms and its relevance to inflammation, cancer, and other health conditions.
Chapters
Insulin stimulates the mTOR complex because it's stimulated by growth factors. Insulin's a big one of those, right? The opposite of doing that then— Hi, I'm Dr. A. I've been teaching and researching in the integrative and naturopathic medical communities for over 30 years now. I've been practicing a very long time, and I use this YouTube channel to answer questions that people have and talk about current health topics. So today what I want to get into is a question that came up after we did our first mTOR/rapamycin question-answer that we did a while back, and that is around what are other ways beyond the drug world or related to the drug world that we might be able to manipulate the mTOR complex with or without using a drug like sirolimus or rapamycin. So that's what we want to get into today. So the first thing that we want to think about is this is a natural process in our body, and we Done other content and we're going to be posting more content on this process. It gets a little bit more into how does it actually work and what's it doing. But the bottom line is this is something our body uses all of the time. And like most processes in the human body, it's kept in a dynamic balance to help us transmit the information from nutrients coming into the body to helping to build and maintain ourselves. So that is its normal process and procedure in the human body. body. And like all of those other things, that means that it has checkpoints that go on either side of the equation that allow it to do whatever it needs to do, but also to stop or slow down doing it when it doesn't need to do that anymore. So when we think about manipulating this process, we use the drug model, which again, we've talked about the drug side of it. I'll mention it briefly, but in the drug world, you use something like rapamycin or sirolimus, as it's called. And that is an inhibitor Of mTOR, mTOR is two different processes that help each other out: mTOR one, mTOR two, and they try and stay in a balance of stimulation, building cells, and then slowing down and letting other things like autophagy go on. So then you might think, well, why would we want to inhibit mTOR? And most of the time, in a healthy person, we don't want to inhibit it. But there are things that mTOR does that we might want to modulate if we have particular. Outcomes that we're trying to go for, such as healing during a chronic inflammatory period, maybe cleaning up after an inflammatory period, things of that nature. There's lots of other things that happen as well. Now, I just want to mention, although this— we're going to talk about non-drug avenues to manipulate mTOR, the concept we want to think about is we're not really stopping mTOR. So you hear mTOR inhibition, that's what the drugs do, but they don't stop it. Otherwise, it would stop your life. So it's one of those things where it's really more downward modulating the process. The next thing is that even in the drug world, we have the classic mTOR inhibition that might be rapamycin, also known as sirolimus. There's a newer drug called everolimus, although they're both fairly old at this point. And those are your classic mTOR manipulators. And then there's others in that category as well. And they're mostly used, at least on label, for anti-organ rejection. They're used as immunomodulators, immunoinhibitory substances. The other thing though, in the drug world, is there are some of the cardiac glycoside drugs which are also mTOR modulators. This is interesting in that I do work, we talk about on this channel about it, in the repurposed or off-label oncology drug world and repurposed off-label, you know, inflammatory modulating drugs. And cardiac glycosides are in that category as well. And it might be partly because of this mechanism and partly because of other mechanisms, but the one you might've heard about was digoxin related to digitalis, a very old cardiac drug that came from a plant originally, foxglove plant. And then it was converted and people were given digitalis, which was essentially purified foxglove, and then digoxin. And now it's not used that much anymore clinically, but it turns out that digoxin is also an mTOR modulator as a drug. So it's a plant drug. Digoxin is actually a drug. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. We'll see you over there. Thanks. But there's another couple of things that modulate mTOR that I think are very interesting. One is the balance between insulin stimulation and fasting. So we know that when mTOR is working really quickly and doing its thing, that autophagy, so cell cleanup and removal, is minimized. So pro-mTOR, anti-autophagy. Insulin Stimulates the mTOR complex because it's stimulated by growth factors. Insulin's a big one of those, right? The opposite of doing that then, because insulin would be a growth factor associated with more carbohydrate coming in the body, body releases insulin. Fasting would be the opposite side of that. So it's almost like a balance there. And so feeding and fasting are another way to manipulate the mTOR complex. Beyond the global effects of eating or not eating, Et cetera. There's also an amine structure amino acid called taurine, and taurine is used a lot in nutritional medicine, certainly in deficiency, but also to help with osmolite activity at the cells, meaning moving the ions back and forth across cell membranes through taurine-gated membrane channels, et cetera. It turns out also that taurine, the amino acid, is a modulator, so-called inhibitor of mTOR as well. And there's research if you look up tor. And mTOR, you'll come upon those papers. Now, probably the biggest area as far as broad-reaching, you know, mTOR non-drug effectors are going to be mTOR modulators, mTOR inhibitors that are from the botanical world, from the plant world. So we talked about a drug coming from foxglove, the plant, to digitalis and digoxin, but also a lot of the plant medicines that you've heard about for other things turn out to be mTOR modulators or mTOR inhibitors. That would be things like resveratrol. You hear about that from red wine and things of that nature. It's also resveratrol used in supplements. EGCG, which comes from green tea. It's a constituent of green tea that's used a lot in inflammatory problems. It's used as a supportive botanical in cancer, et cetera. Turns out EGCG is in there. Honokiol, another one that you mostly see in the world of cancer and cancer support. Curcumin, which we see come up all over the place, is probably the one of the most written about, one of the most published about botanicals. Chemicals in the world of health effects and healthcare and medicine. Another common one is quercetin, which is a bioflavonoid. Turns out that's also an mTOR modulator. Olive leaf and olive-related things. So olea, olea europaea being the Latin for olive, a plant, olive leaf. And things like hesperidin, it's a relative in the category of bioflavonoids with like quercetin and other bioflavonoids. Particular type of salvia known as Dan Shen, Often used in other types of plant medicine, and then some of the ginseng subfractions. So ginsenosides, ginsenoside R1 is also studied as a mTOR modulator, mTOR inhibitor. And again, this is also used in integrative cancer care as well. Now we're going to do other topics on mTOR, getting into like its mechanics and how might it affect inflammation, how might it affect cancer care, how might it affect other things. But I wanted to just answer this question about what was there beyond the drug world. Of, you know, sirolimus and everolimus that might modulate mTOR and might help. So number one, we gotta remember it's a normal process in the body, which means it has things that stimulate it and then things that inhibit it. And that should go back and forth throughout the day so that we have a pro-cell growth time and then a cell cleanup time. So we kind of have this yin and yang of cell growth and cleanup. And then we also want to remember that what normally stimulates mTOR would be the feeding event, meaning eating, And especially things like insulin and other growth factors. And then what naturally would put it into its quiet time so the cell cleanup can go on, and that would be when we're not eating. So eating versus not eating becomes very important. Then we have things like cardiac glycoside drugs, taurine, the amino acid, and then a number of botanical substances. So we're going to put a number of references down below just because they're of interest to people, and I'll put them in the description box, and you can take a look at those things. We're also going to link a few of the other videos here at the end on the end screen that you take a look at. I want to thank everybody who's subscribed. If you haven't, please do subscribe. Do all the things, notifications, like, share, et cetera. And we really appreciate the community. It's grown quite a lot in the last year, and we love answering these questions. So I'm Dr. A. I will see you guys on the next video.
