Making Your Golden Years Sparkle: How to Look and Feel Great After 50

Welcome to the Peptides and Longevity Podcast, redefining aging and transforming health. Each week, Dr. Kent Holtorf will dive into groundbreaking science, innovative therapies, and the future of health and longevity alongside visionary physicians and experts. We'll explore how peptides, cutting-edge medicine, and lifestyle strategies can redefine the way we age. Get ready to transform your health, optimize your vitality, and unlock the secrets to a longer, healthier life. Let's get started. Hi, it's Dr. Kent Holtorf. Today we'll be talking with Chris Turnpau, Dr. Chris Turnpau, uh, with a, um, basic discussion on looking great after 50 and feeling even better. So, uh, Dr. Turnpau is, uh, pretty amazing background, skilled practitioner whose primary focus is on finding and addressing the root cause of disease, which is key. He graduated from the Life College of Chiropractic and received a post-doctorate in functional neurology. His interest in functional medicine began when he helped an ALS patient, you know, where doctors basically say, "ALS," the standard doctors, and we've seen this, say, "You're— it's incurable, send you home to die," and they get better. and we have patients come in with, in wheelchairs, they're jogging. So it's amazing the stuff that we see, you know, looking at the literature, and so he treats some of the, definitely the sick of the sick, but also healthy patients, which is very amazing. He has a huge staff as well. He attended a seminar in 1995 given by Jeffrey Bland, the father of functional medicine, and he was hooked. That began his career as really looking for the cause. And I think that is the difference of functional medicine versus standard medicine. And I think also really passion to continually learn. That's what you see with the so-called— I don't know what to call our whole group. I hate alternative, functional medicine, integrative, I don't know. I just say we're practicing better medicine.

Better. Yeah, better.

Um, his passion is, uh, uh, basically the functional medicine that he opened up the Turnpaw Health and Wellness Center in 1999. Um, he has employed a huge staff and trains them all. He speaks all over the country, trains doctors. Uh, he enjoys the overall team approach and loves sharing knowledge with the team, patients, and providers. Extensive experience in supporting patients who are dealing with the most difficult chronic autoimmune and neurologic health conditions, you know, who just get passed from doctor to doctor in standard care. He has a personal experience in not only supporting Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, Fragile X syndrome— was interesting because very rare— and pediatric neurologic conditions, thyroid conditions, hormones. I know he lectures on that as well. So he is basically— teaches providers across the country about thyroid, brain disorders, of course a lot of neurologic conditions. In his free time, he just continues to read probably, but he says he likes to go outside and enjoy hiking, swimming, college football— what's going on with that— and spending time with friends, family, and his wife Heather. So he gets some kudos for that, and 4 children. ILADS member, lecture for masterminds in thyroid, functional blood chemistry, Lyme disease, co-infections, neurology, neurobehavioral disorders, Alzheimer's, PANDAS, which is very common. So he's really not only treating the sick of the sick and very complex patients, but he's teaching other doctors about it. So, um, welcome. Thanks for having me, for being on.

It's an honor to be on. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Yeah, so interesting, interesting background. Um, became a chiropractor, then you got interested in neurology, did a post-doctorate in neurology. Just tell me a little bit about that.

So I went to chiropractic school, and, uh, when I went to chiropractic school, I wasn't even sure what I was doing, just kind of was led that way. When I was in chiropractic school, I thought, well, once I learned chiropractic, what I thought— I, like all everybody, as soon as you learn your, your profession, you have it all figured out, and you quickly learn you don't have it all figured out. So one of the postdoc programs that I gravitated to was the functional neurology, just went deeper into the causes of some neurologic dysfunction and how the brain is functioning and how we can drive different areas of the brain and get it to work better. So I went through that. That was a 3-year postdoc, and, uh, that was, that was great. And I thought I had it all figured out at that point too. And as you kind of alluded to, that's when a patient, um, who, uh, Mark Urich came in and he said, hey, I have ALS, what are you going to do for me? And I said, well, I'm, you know, I'm a big shot. I have a neuro degree. I'm, you know, I have specialized training and He said, "You better learn more because you don't have it all figured out yet." And he forced me to learn real quick, and that started me down the road of functional medicine. So the— that's kind of how it went. I just constantly was yearning and learning, so just never gave up on things that I didn't know, never rested on my heels, and that's what led me down the neurodiplomate pathway.

I think that's great. I think that's the difference between doctors. It's not what, you know, specialty degree you have, you have 5, you know, residencies, but I find doctors who 20 years out, they're still doing the same thing they did in residency. You know, it's that continually learning and things are moving fast and they're exciting in this integrative area and things in medicine move very slow. You know, I have articles on, it takes on average 17 years for a proven new therapy to to get accepted into mainstream medicine to standard physicians. So it's called 17 Years Ahead. And that's what, you know, this whole group of integrated physicians are practicing 17 years ahead of what you're going to get from your doctor. And, and you always, the less a doctor knows, the more adamant they're right.

And the more you know, that's it. The less you know, the more you're, the more you claim to know. And, and you're so right. I say if I had to practice the way I did 5 years ago, I'd quit. But I hope to say that 5 years from now too. You hope to say that every, every year. If I have to practice the way I did yesterday, I'd want to quit.

So yeah, I think, I think you have to. And, uh, you know, a lot of people that get in this get— have been sick themselves, um, and realize, hey, standard medicine, that's how I got into it. I know a lot of other guys, but you had a different— another patient who said, right, I get this patient better, and then started looking like, hey, there's a lot I can— that I can do.

He straight up looked me in the eye and he said, you better learn or quit because we don't need doctors that aren't willing to learn. But he had not— he says, "I got ALS. If you're not willing to learn on this journey with me, just quit and do something else because you're worthless in the profession." He was very, very frank. And I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. And there just happened to be a Jeffrey Bland seminar in New York City. I said, "Well, I got to figure out something." And I went there and I was, "Well, there's a whole lot I don't know." So it was the conversation. And I tell all my docs that work with me, I'm like, "You got to learn. Learn or quit." because we don't need docs that aren't learning.

So, wow, that, that's amazing. I guess you can say whatever you want when you have ALS.

It's kind of like, yeah, you got kind of free rein. What are you gonna do?

Yeah. Uh, so that's great. I can't say— and, you know, I know we're going to focus on, you know, feeling better and looking better after 50. All of us, uh, over 50, really, uh, looking forward to talking to you about that. But let's talk a little about, you know, all these different, very complex patients that that you treat, but what have you found, you know, when did peptides start influencing your treatments or becoming part of your treatments for these complex patients?

So that's a great question because a lot of offices, as you know, they'll specialize in Lyme disease or mold or thyroid or gluten or digestion or headaches or sleep. And so I never wanted to be pigeonholed into that. I want somebody to be able to come in my office and say, I have X. And big word that I use in my office is I don't want to have a confirmation bias towards a condition. So if I'm a Lyme doctor, I'm going to think that I have a confirmation bias that everything's Lyme disease. And by the same token, if it's a mold doctor, everything's mold. If everything is environmental, then everything's environmental— mercury, you know. So I want to have that general knowledge, and I like the challenge to— somebody comes in as a blank slate, and I don't have that confirmation bias. Now, by doing that, you get to see and experience and learn from, quite frankly, the other practitioners who are all those specialists, because you go to the, the ologist, ologist, ologist, and then they come here and you get to be the generalist and kind of look at the whole picture. So that's how it started. We started to see complex patients and in our quest to constantly learn and help patients that weren't getting answers other places, that's where the peptides kind of snuck in. And they started probably, oh, 2.5+ years ago, right around there, and it didn't hit very hard. It was very— it was like a trickle, a trickle of water. I wasn't real confident with them. I wasn't real aware of them. And so then that led to kind of abandoning them for a while because I didn't have the knowledge base. And then probably maybe about a year— well, time flies, right? Except for the past 2 months. Um, um, probably about a year, year and a half ago is when we started to jump in pretty heavy into the peptides. Um, and so we got into peptides and, and then they— we were using them for one particular reason, basically the immune system. We're looking at just boosting the immune system. And then when you jump into the world of peptides, you can see There's a whole host of benefits across many disciplines, barriers, and health conditions and support that you can really get into.

So yeah, I think that's interesting. And that's the same thing I found, is that all these conditions, they kind of boil down to the same problems, especially syndromes. You know, it's like, oh, they have this syndrome, and you look, it's like we do— like, for instance, they say, you know, chronic fatigue syndrome. Oh, I think did such a disservice in fibromyalgia. It gave doctors the license to go, oh, you have fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, there's nothing I can do, here's an antidepressant, not do anything. Well, what's causing it? And, you know, we found with the extensive panel, we can pick out a chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Lyme patient 80% of the time, and, you know, really how severe they are about 70% of the time. And when they say there's, oh, there's no labs to do, it's like, are you crazy?

Oh yeah, we're the largest non-hospital draw. We're the largest non-hospital blood draw in the state of Pennsylvania. So when they say there's no labs to do, they probably haven't been to my office or your office because there's a lot of labs to do.

And the phlebotomists just go, oh my God, because, you know, and now with medicine, the doctors are bonus, especially with HMOs, for being cost effective.

Right.

Means not doing any tests, not making any diagnoses, and so they try not to find anything and try not to treat you, where we're the opposite. I think, you know, it's like medical detectives, right?

Where I'm the opposite of that. And another word that I use in the office, some— one of my docs, we have a lot of different physicians here and practitioners in the office, and so, um, right or wrong, I say I'm the escalation clause. So they come down the hallway and they say, what do you think of this? So it escalates to me and I ask the same question all the time. What's the mechanism? I don't want to know the syndrome. Don't tell me how you labeled it. Don't tell me the sign that you put on that. What's the mechanism? So what's the mechanism of that action? Oh, I have chronic fatigue. Okay. So what is that? What's the mechanism of that? Is it mitochondrial? Is it infectious? Is it vector-borne? Where's— what's the mechanism of the expression of the body? What's that mechanism? So it doesn't— the ICD-10 code isn't as important to me as the mechanism of the action.

Yeah, it's only if you want to like, look at this, there's— this is what they have, you treat them with this, you know. And unfortunately, I think doctors coming out of medicine, uh, more and more, like a lot of doctors like this, is they've done great on tests, is they memorize. And so we'll, you know, be training doctors like, what's the protocol? I'm like, there is no protocol, it's concepts.

Protocol is a 4-letter word, right?

Yeah, and they just want, well, what if they have this, do this, this, this, you know, and drives some doctors crazy because that's how they're taught, especially now with medicine. And, you know, this is the— if you don't, like in the ER, if you don't do exactly like this, you're brought up in front of the, you know, from the board, the board, and why didn't you go down this algorithm? And they don't think, you know, we're going to get replaced by artificial intelligence. It'll be a computer, plug in your symptoms, all they'll need is a nurse to just go, okay, one doctor in Oklahoma, and go, okay, that's good, you know.

Interesting. To piggyback that, I say to— now, I see patients, the average patient sees us after they've seen 11 other physicians. So we stopped doing the calculations a couple years ago, and that's like a lot of offices. So I'm not— we're no different than, you know, your office and a lot of— they've been a lot of places, so And I look them right in the eye and I say, I promise you one thing in this case, I'll make a mistake. I promise you I'm going to make a mistake. And they've been to these well-rehearsed and they've been right down the street is a little hospital. You might've heard of it. It's called Johns Hopkins. So I get patients from that little hospital down there and I look them in the eye and I said, I'm going to make a mistake. I'll try to make it, I'll try to rectify it quickly, but I don't know how this is going to turn. What makes you think I have this all figured out? I don't. So let's just get the ground rules established. I'm going to do the best I can for you. I'm going to continuously learn. You're different than the patient was before and the patient afterwards, and I'll probably make a small mistake on this case. I'll do my best to fix it and turn it around. I don't know where this is going to go.

I, I love that. And I also think about, yeah, we have like the patient like, I finally got an appointment at Mayo Clinic. I'm like, I'll see you in 3 weeks.

Yeah, I'll see you right after that.

Like, they're like, oh my God, it was— yeah, that's It's funny that they think that's going to be here and it's, yeah, same old stuff. But, um, and, um, so what peptides did you start with? And, um, was it more for the complex patients or kind of the healthier patients?

So we started off, um, so my whole thought process is how the immune system differentiates, whether it shifts in a pattern of TH1, TH2, TH17, for, you know, how these— this immune activation happens. Do we have natural killer cells? So I caught a whiff of it, and one of my other practitioners, Dr. Regina Smith, we were, um, we were talking about it, and, and we were newbies, and we heard about this thymosin alpha 1 and thymosin beta 4, and, um, it kind of took our attention, and we didn't know much about it, and, and One was a Th1 stimulant, one's a Th2, and we were lost in that. So we started on that because, well, if we could get the immune system trained better to work better, that really would help a lot. And we tried to use peptides, but we didn't know how to monitor it. We didn't know what we were doing. So that's where it started because that resonated with me. If we could influence the immune system to work better, we didn't know the right doses and nobody did. You know, part of the— part of being on the bleeding edge is sometimes you bleed a little bit. You're on the cutting edge and it cuts sometimes. So we would admittedly— we're trying to figure it out. And then we refined that and we used a lot of the immune-influencing peptides, the thymosin alpha-1, thymosin beta-4, with pretty big success. And we're using that for the chronically ill. We're supporting the immune system for patients who have things like Lyme disease or chronic vector-borne illnesses or anything, in fact. And so since then, it has had tremendous benefits for those who have immune compromise. If we can establish that their immune system is shifted or tilted or altered in one way, we can push it back pretty easily with those peptides. It's pretty impressive. Once we knew what we were looking for and how to measure it, what patients to look for, that's where we started with the thymosin.

And I, I can't agree more. And I think We, you know, kind of switched. I'd say we're treating so much chronic Lyme, instead of myself, you know, 22 centers treating chronic fatigue syndrome, and, you know, antibiotics, antibiotics. And we found, even for myself, 3 and a half years of the highest dose IV antibiotics, 7 at a time, crazy. And then found peptides and really the immune system. And I think we're kind of really an immune modulatory clinic, you know. And you just look at the vicious cycle with everything and, you know, you you find that the immune system causes basically, you know, also the immune system's dropped. Now you get other infections coming through. You suppress the mitochondria, which is a huge issue. You get coagulation, you get pituitary dysfunction. So there are low thyroid, there are low hormones, even though the standard blood tests look normal. They get— and then environmental toxins and mold all play a part. And that's the thing, like, I think standard physician training is one thing causes, you know, one thing. And I think, for instance, with Lyme disease, if you just have Lyme disease, you're probably fine, you know.

Oh yeah, yeah, that'd be easy, right? That's an easy— yeah, it's an easy one.

And, you know, get more of those. And but it's everything. I think, you know, with the stress, and stress we found is just the biggest. And people think it suppresses the immune system, but it really causes that suppression of Th1, increased Th2, so they get inflammation. And which I think is a shame also because you see like kind of the standard quintessential chronic fatigue syndrome, look at the studies, you know, low Th1, high Th2. And after, let's say, divorce or death in the family, and the doctors say, oh, see, it's just a stressed-out woman, you know.

Yeah, it's just because, it's just because, it's just because. Well, the reality is, so I wore a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor, for a while. I don't have diabetes or anything. I wore that just to see what kind of stress.

I love that, that you're doing something like that.

I was just like, I'm just going to wear this for a couple months and see what happens. I ran— a little aside, a little rabbit hole— I ran a half marathon and I never— I just decided to go out and do it. My wife's like, you're crazy. She trained all summer with her friends. I said, I'll do it with you. And I hadn't run in 5 years, so it wasn't good. But I did the first 6 miles and I wore the CGM the whole— I've been wearing the CGM for months. I did the first 6 miles, I didn't do any sugar replacement, electrolyte replacement, and then I ran the second 6 miles and I did it. I'm just comparing all the data. But the biggest piece I took from wearing the CGM is stress raised my cortisol level. So I got a mild level elevation of fasting glucose and that was— that is long-term consequences from brain degeneration, hippocampal degeneration, and all of the chronic diseases, mitochondrial dysfunction from stress, stress alone.

I thought that was a statin deficiency.

Yeah, I had a deficiency. And then, you know, I've never had a problem sleeping, but I'm pretty diligent. I have an Oura Ring, so I check out where my sleep is, and I can tell you things that affect my sleep and then are related to my blood sugar. So I was my own investigator. I also never go more than 3 weeks without drawing my own blood. I get— I have an in-house phlebotomist, and every 3 weeks I get blood tests done. I just track myself as data points. I'm not sure I know what to do with it all, but I track data points on myself every 3 weeks.

I'm kind of like a lazy version of you. I have all the test kits and I do them. Or exercise is my passion. I religiously do it every 4 months for 8 minutes. But so I can't like coach people how to eat because I don't do so well.

Yeah.

But, um, yeah, I'm a terrible patient too. But, um, yeah, so it's great, you know, so you're treating all these very complex patients and I know you're getting very good success. Have you found it's difficult to now get that, uh, more healthy patient that just wants to be optimized and, and again, the 50-year-old wants to feel better and look better?

Yeah, so we made a shift. The shift was— it is— I really appreciated getting my hands dirty. I was never afraid to get my hands dirty. Give me a patient, I don't know if I can fix them, but I want the challenge. I want to help people. If you don't have anywhere else to go, I don't like the answer, "Well, sorry." You know, some people are told, "Well, once I name what's wrong with you, you'll be at least— you'll have something to hang your hat on, a name." Well, nobody That works for about 30 seconds and they're like, "Well, I don't feel better." But when you start to see patients that come in, and it's no exaggeration, and I know your office is the same, they are— so did you lose me for a second there? Sorry. Yeah, yeah, we lost you for a second. Sorry. So the statement, people come in and they say, "Kill me or cure me," and I know, like I said, it's in a lot of the offices like yours and when they come in and they say, "Fix me or end me because I don't want to keep going like this." And so that's— my heart goes out to them. I know I bleed, my heart is on my sleeve, uh, but it's exhausting. It's exhausting taking care of kill-me-or-cure-me patients. So then you start to say— so the transition going from the, the complex patient to the longevity patient, so to speak, and And patients were coming in burnout. Well, they were burnout. I was getting burned out because it was kill me or cure me mentality because they were so sick. And when you go kill me or cure me, I like the challenge. My heart went out to them to try to help them. But after a while, you know, you can't help everybody. You can help a lot of people. We had really good outcomes, but at the same time, um, it was exhausting. And sometimes it's nice to have a patient come in and say, uh, I just want to stay healthy. And I was getting older myself and I want to stay healthy.

And how do I do—

yeah. So our new message is get healthy, stay healthy, right? The COVID crisis has kind of brought that to the forefront from obesity and diabetes and all these little things. So get healthy, stay healthy. What does that mean? So I had patients coming in with some disposable income and they said, all this money in the world isn't going to help me if I don't feel good, if I'm not healthy.

I learned that, man. Like, you don't have your health, you could be rich. I was like, "Praise him, take everything." If I could just feel better, because you can't do anything.

No.

Yeah.

What good is it if you can't do anything with it? So we started, instead of a longevity program, we started what I call the Livegevity program. And so it's about adding all the life you can. There's no guarantees in life. We start off with that. We say, what can we do to optimize and maximize what you do? And we do obviously a bunch of labs, as I mentioned before, we do— we're heavy into labs and lifestyle. But I have something I'll share with you. It's called The Hand of Health. This is a book I'm writing, in fact. So it's called The Hand of Health. And The Hand of Health is this simple. If you have a hand, you can understand health. It's how and when you eat, how and when you sleep, how and when you move. That's your foundation. How and when you eat, how and when you sleep, how and when you move. So that can take in intermittent fasting, paleo, vegan, whatever you want to do. We talk about that, how you sleep, when you sleep, how and when you move, type of exercise you're doing. That includes meditation, self-help, all that kind of stuff. So moving is sometimes being still, right? And then are you doing phase 3, phase 4 training? And then last on the fingers is what you need to supplement with to maintain that. So they're here and then way over here when needed is a medication. So you might need a medication. And then the hand represents the hand that reaches out and helps others, the hand that reaches out and says, "I need help," the hand that reaches out. So the hand is very important too. So with that, we started the Live Jeavity program, and cornerstone of that was we did your foundational physiology, but you also need additional support because we want to keep you from aging as quickly as you are. So that's extraordinary. That's not ordinary. So people came in and said, I want to be extraordinary, I want to age slower. Well, part of that longevity program is peptides for everybody. Everybody is going to get on peptides when they do that. And one of the reasons is if you live long enough, you are— you have an increased probability to get cancer, you have an increased probability to get cardiovascular disease, you have an increased probability to— brain doesn't work as well as it did. And that starts with the thymic involution, right? So the thymus starts to decay, this, this this school for your immune system starts to drift off in the 6th decade of life and it needs a little bit of extra support. So we drifted from the chronically ill, kill me or cure me, I feel really terrible, it doesn't matter what you do, just do something patient, to the patient saying, hey Chris, what can I do? Can you use the knowledge you've done over the past 25 years to just refine my health and make sure I'm moving in the right process? Can I go on the right process? And boy, that is a— that is— I love still taking care of the really sick patient who has nowhere to go, but I really appreciate the mental decompression of— and just help, help me age gracefully, help give me that longevity program. And so we'll do the IVs and the support that they need to help their bodies, but it always includes peptides. That's how we transitioned. Yeah.

And it is, it's like, you know, treat the sickest of the sick, and that's like our center has become. And I'm like, you know, give me a person who needs a little thyroid, or you have these patients that, you know, longevity. And do you think really that a key is having an educated patient?

Yes. So in our facility, in our office here with all of our 11 providers, we have health coaches underneath them. They need— the patient has to be vested, the patient has to be involved. That's why I said how when you eat, how when you sleep, how when you move. That's their homework. That's free. They need to be vested and they need to be interested in that. And then we take the time to say, you're not going to take this pill, you're not going to take this peptide, you're going to know what this is, you're going to know why you're taking it, you're going to be understanding what you're doing to your body so you can be held accountable and you can take control of your health. Very— they leave very well educated and they're going to go out and they're going to talk to their other family doc or their other friends that are physicians and say, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. They have— they're fully armed when they leave the office.

And I think that's your best friend is an educated patient because they'll go to their family practice or specialist even, "Oh, this is crazy. That's quackery." And you know, or I, you know, I'm used to it now, Or you get a patient that's seeing a doctor who they love, they're very nice, uh, they come in like they don't want their doctor to know, and they get better, they go back, they're excited to tell them, and you think the doctor's happy. They're mad.

They're very upset.

They will not see the patient again. That's quackery, like, you know, and it's scary. But I really think that the educated patient— I think the days of people listening to their doctor and just taking this pill at 4 o'clock, you know, and I think a lot of doctors don't want to be challenged, like, "I'm the doctor." I said, if a doctor won't answer your questions when you say, "Well, what about this study, this study?" Run.

Yeah.

So, like, read the internet, okay, there's great information on the internet, there's some wrong information, come and talk to me and we'll talk about it. But so many doctors, I don't want to bash on standard doctors so much, but I mean, it's a whole different system, right?

That we don't— we encourage our patients to be educated. We want them to bring us ideas. And when a doctor— I tell patients too, doctors work for you, you don't work for them. So you get to fire your doctor whenever you're dissatisfied with them. I mean, you would fire any other employee or any other— if somebody came to your house and was building a room and it was crooked, you'd fire them. They work for you, you don't work for them, so fire them.

I even have a friend who's very sick and we try to treat him, but he won't— basically, he doesn't know why he's taking this, why he's taking that. I said it can't work that way. One, it's dangerous because you don't know what to look for side effects, and even asking, are you feeling better from this or that, he can't tell me because he doesn't know why he's taking this or that. And I'm like, I'm sorry, we can't— like, it can't work that way.

Every patient, I draw out the immune system for them, and I make it so simple that a 5th grader can understand it. So I draw out the immune immune system, and then I write down everything they're taking and where it is involved in the immune system. So it's not a name disease or a name condition, it's just supporting their immune system. They understand it. When they go home to their spouse or their cousin or their friend who's a family doc, they show them the piece of paper and say, here's the mechanism of why I'm taking that, here's the mechanism of action. And the mechanism of action— and then they know, oh, they're becoming more educated. They know what they need, what they need more of, what they need less of. What the side effects are and what they're doing to manipulate their immune system. And they also know how they age. They're like, that is a product of aging. I don't want to get brown. I don't want to brown on the inside.

Yeah. Or yeah, I want to live longer but in a nursing home.

Right.

You know, and when you look at that's what's killing people is being frail, right? So it's basically, you know, They can't leave the house, they can't walk, they break a hip, they're— and the quality of life, yeah, you can live longer, but it's live better longer.

And what's, what's this with, well, you're, you're getting old at 50, at 60? When is it that you get old and you stop? Like, what is it when you're, oh, well, now you're, you're 72, so we don't care about you? Or what is it about, like, well, you're just getting older? Like, no, what are you talking about? You should get dementia at 50. No, you shouldn't. You should get it at 60, 70. They just give up. You're giving up on them.

It's like, it's— that's normal. It's normal to get cancer, don't we get heart disease? Well, you know, you're older. It's crazy. Or even you look at testosterone ranges, okay? So testosterone ranges every decade have dropped because they take 95% of the people and they say, what's the average? And it goes down and down. So now the reference range is so low compared to 30 years ago, 40 years ago, where you would be so low. Now you're normal. Well, you're normal, but it's also normal to get cardiovascular disease, have a heart attack, and get cancer, you know.

Right, the norms are not normal. That's the problem. The norms in society are not normal. It's not normal aging, and testosterone is a big one. I said, you know, testosterone— the Leydig cells in your testicles are very, very sensitive to inflammation. So the longer you live, the more likely to have some inflammation to reduce your testosterone. But testosterone helps you get over inflammation. So I don't know about you, but I want my testosterone to be the same it was when I was 25 when I'm 95.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think everything— I think you know, it is a vicious cycle in medicine, you know. And so what— let's talk about— I come in, I'm over 50, and I'm not feeling my best. What, what things do you do and what, what do you look at?

What are some key peptides that you So the first question is, what are your goals? So I want to meet your goals because I don't have to live in your body. You have to live in your body. So if somebody comes in the office who's, say, a 50 middle-aged person and they want to know what we're going to do for a Livegevity program, we sit down and I say, you know, what are you willing to do with your diet? What are you willing to do with your sleep? What are you willing to do with your movement, exercise, and self-awareness? We'll do a battery of blood tests, a full complimentary blood tests, which are going to evaluate their physiology, where it is, what we can optimize, and then how we're going to optimize it. As I said, I'll be their medical Sherpa. That's a term I like to use and a friend of mine coined. So I'll carry your bags, I'll walk with you on the journey, but if you don't want to go on the journey, I'm not going to drag you. So whatever. And if I say I'd like you to do this and they say, well, I'll do a lot of things, but I'm not giving up wings with my friends on Thursday nights, I'll figure it out. I'll tailor the program to you. But the ground rules are established and then we determine, well, from there, what we— I don't take anything off the table. It's like a huge smorgasbord. So I say, this is my optimal plan. My optimal plan is going to include— we have a— it's called a Live Jeavity package. And the Live Jeavity package includes a monthly IV, a monthly massage, a monthly JuveLite, a monthly hyperbaric if they want it, a monthly pulse, mat if they want it. And but with that, it is basically required— peptides are part of that program to shift the immune system away from aging, or at least slow the aging process down with great probability. The other piece I tell them is there's no guarantees. We could do this program, you could get hit by a bus, you still could get cancer. This is not promising you you're not going to have something. It increases the probability of healthy aging. That's all we're doing. So it's not a guarantee and we're not treating anything. We're just promoting health. So we look at lab markers, hold ourselves accountable, and go forward from there.

So I come in, you say take these peptides. Well, I've never heard of these. Why do you claim that they decrease aging?

So a couple of them, the literature has shown that some will manipulate the immune system. Some will support the immune system, some will actually show telomere lengthening. And I know telomeres aren't everything they thought they once were, but we also say over time, and we go through a lengthy explanation, but we talk about—

Can you just mention what telomeres are?

So if you think of like, the best way it was described to me is like a Tootsie Roll. And you take the ends of the Tootsie Roll, those little frayed ends. So every time that DNA opens up and divides, the, the Tootsie Roll gets short, the frayed ends get shorter and shorter and shorter until they can't make another one of itself, it can't replicate. And that is the end of the cell life, the cell has no more life after that. So if you could theoretically keep the end of your Tootsie Rolls long, then you're never going to run out of Tootsie Roll. So you're saying that the Tootsie Roll in this case is the life of the cell, the cell will continue to—

That's one marker you use.

That's one marker. We use mitochondrial health. We do a test called a mitoswab, which tests the health of the mitochondria and how that's functioning. We will do probably 70 to 75 blood markers and kind of put them all together from methylation, homocysteine, and—

Yeah, sorry, I said, you know, because mitochondria I think are some of the most exciting parts of anti-aging now, and they're finding with all the neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, Chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic infections, uh, you know, just standard aging, dementia, Parkinson's, all— I mean, they all have mitochondrial dysfunction.

All chronic disease is, is in part mitochondrial dysfunction, whether it's a cell danger response or— all chronic disease involves mitochondria. So if you're, if you're seeing a practitioner for chronic disease, longevity, chronic life, whatever chronic reason you're seeing that physician for, the mitochondria needs to be addressed, assessed, and supported, period. It just— if you're not assessing, addressing, and supporting the mitochondria, you're going to lose the battle. The case will fail. The case will just fail.

I think if you fix the mitochondria, you're going to fix a heck of a lot of stuff and prevent a lot of things as well. So is there a number of peptide combinations, or do you use single peptides, or what do you like to to do with the peptides in terms of longevity and reducing risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, whatever it may be, all those diseases of aging?

Yeah, that's a great question and it's the right question. I think a lot of people will just throw peptides at people without any rhyme or reason, much like medications, drugs, supplements, everything else. So we have a pretty unique approach. We're going to try to re-educate the thymus gland and shift away from things like cancer and shift away from things like autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammatory conditions. So we're going to try and drive that Th1 side of the immune system. So everybody's going to get thymosin alpha 1 at some point, and they're going to do that every year. And that's what I do myself. I do thymosin alpha 1 at least once a year, usually, to be honest with you, twice a year. So I'll do it for every 6 months, I'll usually do it for a month. And then we'll do, if the patients qualify, so one of the other things is you don't want to use a lot of growth hormone stuff if there's cancers, if there's things that you don't want to grow. So I know it's controversial, but we're staying in the cleanest side of it. I don't necessarily know that that's true or not true, but at least I'm on the side.

I'll say this, not that I disagree, but I did a review Growth hormone use and cancer. There's never been a study that shows that giving growth hormone increases cancer, but there are studies. It's interesting that for longevity, like, so growth hormone really works through making IGF-1 in the liver, that low IGF-1 may be good for longevity, you know. And so a little controversy there. I think it's very safe But, uh, so I don't disagree, uh, with you. And just like so many, you know, like it's kind of bodybuilding mentality. Let's just get your muscles big and make you look good, and then, then you're fine. Hey, we're in LA, I guess that works. But, you know, but everywhere else you want to be healthy everywhere. Yeah.

Yeah. And I don't have hard, fast rules, so I say that, but that's a starting point or a guideline, but it's not a hard, hard, fast rule. I do want to have some regeneration. So I might use the CJC-1295, the ipamorelin, I'll use Epitalon, and I'll stack a lot of those together. We used to use cerebrolisin for brain health and different things, blood flow. I'm a huge fan of melanotan, the melanotan 2, not because it makes you tan, but because it also increases blood flow to tissue, blood flow to brain. I want to keep my brain healthy. I find that people, when they take the melanotan 2 specifically, they feel like they've been in the sun. They get better mood. I've actually supported people who have had mood disorders and depression and low mood with Melanotan 2, and it has worked better than a lot of pharmacological agents for their mood disorder just from driving blood flow into the brain. So it's not an aesthetic thing. We don't take it to, to get the tan, but we do— patients do use it and they notice the benefit of increase mood. So we'll put a lot of those together, and I'm not afraid to put 4, 5, 6, 7 together at times. And then sometimes I just use one. I, I just am a big fan of— if I know the mechanism of action and I see the rationale for my treatment, they're doing 4 or 5 at one time.

Yeah, and the nice thing is, is when I get doctors that are like scared to start using them, I mean, it's hard to screw up because like You look at, uh, thymosin beta-4, BPC, they can't find a toxic dose, you know.

Right. It's less side effects than placebo for thymosin alpha-1. More side effects from a placebo.

And also thymosin alpha-1 is approved in, you know, 30 countries for everything from cancer, chronic infections, hepatitis C. Yeah. So, and in boosting immune system, I don't know even an immunologist who checks people's immune system.

No, and that's the frustrating thing is, is if we see this, I'll check IGF-1, IGF-LR3, I'll run a lot of the blood markers for the growth hormone, but I'm looking at the immune system, CD57, CD56, you know, I'm looking for some kind of dominance, whether I can see CD8, CD3 suppression. So we're really looking into the immune system. When I was running the labs, LabCorp called me and said, are you an oncologist? I said, no, I just care about the human physiology. So I don't think labs belong in any ologist center either. If you understand the physiology, I'm a big fan. So the thymosin beta-4, we use the TB frag all the time. I mean, we— I love— so I love repairing organs and tissues and things that wear out. We don't want them to wear out as fast. So we use the thymosin beta-4, thymosin alpha-1. We'll do some CJC-1295, ipamorelin, epitalon. And by the way, I've taken all these myself, all of these. I don't only get my blood work done every 3 weeks myself. I didn't only wear the CGM because I wanted to see what's going on and wear sleep studies. I've done the peptides and I've run my labs. 2 years ago, I induced fatty liver. I gave myself fatty liver and then I reversed it just for the fun of it, just because I wanted to see it.

You really did that?

Yeah, I really did. And I showed them, I showed my fatty liver scores. From the LabCorp testing.

What did you do to do that?

So I ate an awful lot, and this is the weird thing because I didn't— I won't jump off the health train. I went and became like a fruitarian. I ate tons and tons and tons of fruit.

And interesting, I thought that was healthy.

Yeah, so all that fructose that doesn't need insulin— yeah, that fructose that doesn't need insulin to get into your liver, it goes right into your liver without insulin. I induced fatty liver. So I did it in a way that may be perceived as healthy, right? So I didn't do it by just eating McDonald's. I did it with doing a lot of fructose, a lot of fructose.

Wow, because I mean, that shows, you know, the underlying mechanism. And, you know, people think fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, you know, especially fruit juices. And then of course the high fructose corn syrup, I think, is a problem for so many illnesses.

Yeah, so when you translate what I did, which was considered somewhat healthy, and I don't, you know, tons of honey and tons of fruit juices and concentrated fruit, but the average American's drinking all this high fructose corn syrup. They're getting— at least I was getting some antioxidant support, I was getting some phytonutrition from my fruits. They're getting just nothing, just sugar and brain damage from their high fructose corn syrup. So I want to support that. Piece. And so I've done a lot of the peptides myself. I track my numbers, I see what they do, I look for what's beneficial. I don't know that anybody, certainly not me, has it figured out what combinations work for certain patients. And we've counseled patients, this is the effect, you need to know what's going on. We want to push some things, but I'm also a fan of push-pull, you know, like the intermittent fasting and the mTOR pathway, and we get down that whole road. Sometimes you don't want to grow too much because that overgrowth is going to cause you to rapidly, um, grow, but you don't want to just decay and not have any growth. So I like the push-pull. So we might pull some things. We're going to do this hard for maybe 6 weeks and then we're not going to do it for 6 weeks. We'll incorporate that into their diet as well as their peptides. So when we push, we want to push hard and get growth, but then we want to not grow too fast for for too long because that's gonna increase cell replication.

And so let's say, you know, people say, okay, what is this BPC, this TB4 FRAG? I always have a problem explaining it because there's so many studies that it does so many things that it sounds like snake oil.

Right.

You know, if you can mention some of the things that it does and that's supported by the literature.

So one of the things it helps with, T helper cells and how they— and so I try and break down your, your, your T cells, your T helper cells. And so this cell is, is this naive T cell. It doesn't know what it's supposed to be when it grows up, and it can grow up to become many different professions. It becomes a Th1, a Th2, a Th9, a Th22, or a T regulatory cell. And this— what we can do, education, and the school that it can go to is the thymus school, the school in the middle of our chest here, which loses its teachers about the 6th decade of life. So we have no more teachers. And these peptides, one of the things that they can do is these peptides can help bring teachers back to the school. And so these immune cells can actually go to school and learn to become the right profession, Th1 cells, T regulatory cells, we can kind of shut down. And then these T cells, these T helper cells, they can drive inflammation in your body. So if you grow up to become the wrong T helper cell, you're going to drive inflammatory cytokines. So wouldn't it make sense if I grow up to become the right profession, I'm not going to give off as much inflammation and inflammation is linked to heart disease. So the mitochondria, it doesn't have a lot of genes, but the mitochondria influences a lot of genes in our nucleus. So we got to have this healthy mitochondria, not just for energy, but for transcription or messaging of everything that goes on in our body. So if we can help the immune system, we can reduce inflammation, we can give ourselves the right information and energy it needs. Wouldn't it make sense that that would stop many, many, many different processes of aging? That, that would make sense to me. So this is how I try to describe it to a patient, is if we can fix a few key pieces of your immune system, and your energy production system, that you would not get all the things we name of all these ICD-10 codes. So you're not going to get fatigue, you're not going to— you're— I'm sorry, you reduce your probability to get fatigue and cancer and all those things because you have a healthy system. And wouldn't it also make sense that 50 years of abuse, because you may not have known how to do it correctly, or you didn't think at 16 was important, or 26 was important, or 36 was important, is important. So we'll use the peptides, and I say if we can fix the core pieces of your immune system— physiology, energy, and inflammation— well, what disease doesn't— what chronic disease, including aging, doesn't involve inflammation, doesn't involve mitochondrial dysfunction, doesn't include immune dysregulation? If we fix those, you tell me what we're not going to fix.

I, I totally agree. And it's like so many conditions, and we look at like basically even autism, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease. They have the same picture on the labs, and that's what it sounds like you definitely do. And I say I try to paint a picture with all these labs, or patients will ask, what if you don't find it? My doctor says can't find anything wrong with you. You know, they check the CBC, a chem panel, cholesterol, and give them a statin.

Right.

Which is some of the worst thing you can do.

And if I don't find something wrong, then I'm incompetent. I mean, we're going to find something. And so it's, it's just like you said, I had a clinic for special needs kids. I have a child with Fragile X. And so that's why I know about it. And I look at the same markers for him as I do with an Alzheimer's patient. So I'm looking at the same thing because I just want to optimize physiology and you hit the nail on the head. A child with autism, or a child with a disability should be treated the same or assessed the same way somebody is with Alzheimer's. And like Bredesen's book, you know, the Reversing Alzheimer's, all of his markers, when we— I met with him and he said, you've been doing these markers. I said, those markers are health, their physiology. Yes, they can be linked to Alzheimer's, but they can be linked to autism. So I'm just kind of laying it out and saying, this is— we want to optimize your physiology, not name a condition and treat a condition. We want to optimize you. And we can do that through the miracle of peptides. Is one of the— it's a huge— I think it's one of the biggest, if not the biggest breakthrough we've seen in the past 20 years of how we can influence physiology.

I totally agree. And everything's immune dysfunction as you get older, stress, chemicals, you know, heavy metals, chronic infections, all these things.

And you can't clear out your heavy metals, you can't clear out your— you can't clear out all the debris fields without a healthy mitochondria.

So, uh, do you think the combination of, uh, pineal peptide epitalion and thymosin is kind of a core therapy?

Absolutely a core. BPC, I want the body to be able to repair, but I want some pineal peptides. I want some, I want some thymus and immune system peptides. And then we could, we started again into the MOTCs a little bit, but then there was a problem with production. And so, but we had some pretty good results and I'm interested into where this is going because I think this is the tip of the iceberg. We spoke a little bit before we were recording about some exciting breakthroughs you might have coming through. I'm on the edge of my seat literally because I know how that influences the physiology. I know what it can do for patients and—

Yeah, it's people in the physiology, like, oh my gosh. And so do you find that, you know, people who even are healthy, right? I've never seen anyone that's optimal. Especially as they get older. And I think really almost everyone— I rarely say that— should be on a pineal peptide using Epitalion and thymosin, which is a thymic peptide. And the pineal hormone will help the thymus work, but you can also get more. And for its study, I really like the one that looked at, um, Epitalion and thymulin. So thymus peptide. They all work similarly— thymosin alpha 1, thymosin beta 4, thymulin, thymogen. So all those, they'll modulate that immune system. But looking at patients with significant cardiovascular disease in a 15-year study, and they found that the people on the combination, actually their cardiovascular function got better, not worse. They lived longer, higher quality of life. Dramatic reduction in cancer. And people will say, like, you know, like when I first started lecturing on these, that, "Oh, I've never heard this," and they can't believe how hundreds and hundreds of studies on these. And it's amazing, it just hasn't caught on here. And they can't believe how evidence-based it is, you know.

Well, so that's interesting because evidence-based is originally was supposed to include the wishes of the patient, the clinical acumen, and the current literature. Well, I can tell you firsthand, the clinical literature is out there. The literature is out there. I mean, the, the literature— this is, this is not a one-off study. There's tons and tons of peer-reviewed papers on this. The clinical acumen comes with experience, which I like to say— I know you do— I have a lot of experience with this, not just with myself, but with thousands of patients now. And then the patient's wishes. The patients are saying, hey, what's the best information you can offer me with your clinical experience to help me age gracefully? Well, I think it would be very, very, very blunted if I didn't say you should be doing something for your pineal gland, something for your thymic gland or your thymus gland, and something for your mitochondrial function. I think it would be foolish to not address those three. And so to your point, almost all, unless the patient has some philosophical aversion to it, we'll include those in combination almost all the time. We need to work with your immune system and your thymus gland. We need to work with your pineal gland in your brain, and we want to do something to support your mitochondrial function long-term. Uh, and that's the pieces we can handle. Again, that doesn't change your diet, your life, your sleep, and your, your exercise. But those are— and so we'll continually, we'll do them in combination. We'll roll on and off. We'll push a little bit, pull a little bit. But we'll use those in combination throughout the entire year. We'll see changes in their function that they didn't think were even being addressed over 3— we check them every 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. We do a 3-month check-in with every one of the patients. And we'll see the changes. Some of them are gradual and some of them— but the The— those are the objective findings, but subjectively they didn't know they could feel that good because they never set the bar high enough to even feel that good. To your point, nobody's optimal, right? They're close. And I use the Olympic athlete. They're pretty close because they monitor everything they do. If we treated the 50, 55, 60-year-old patient who wanted to be in their best health like we treat an Olympic athlete, which is what I think we should do and what I think I do do in the office is you don't deserve to be 60%. If an Olympic athlete is at 96%, they're not even on the stage. They need to be 99. That's what we try to do for our longevity patients.

Well, what about, well, I'm normal. The doctor said my level is normal.

I say you're in the norm. The norm isn't normal. You know, the norm is everybody feels like crap when they're 55. That's not normal. I don't want to— and if that's the case, I want to be a statistical anomaly. I don't want to be the norm. I don't want to be what they call normal. I want to be exceptional, and I want you to be exceptional. And you didn't work your butt off this long for this many years to be in this position, to be 55 working 12-hour days, 5 days a week, to not take that and invest it back into yourself and for you to be exceptional for the last 50 years of your life.

Yeah, I, I totally agree. And I think when you explain to patients, you know, what normal means They basically take 95% of the people, and only if you're the lowest 2.5%, you're considered abnormal. So you're the lowest 3%, 5%, then, oh, you're normal. That's like a D-minus is great. Yeah. And they feel terrible, and the doctor will, oh, let's check it again, you know, and— or if it's abnormal and it might be a little in the normal range, you go, okay, you're normal now, I don't have to treat you.

And to that point, I say this too. I say, if this is the trajectory, I asked this question and I didn't come up with it. I probably stole it from somebody. I said, how long do you want to live? And they say, well, I want to live to be 89. I'm like, well, what do you want to be able to do when you're 89? Well, I want to be able to live and walk and get up the steps. So what does that mean when you're 79, 69, and 59, and 49? And if you're just this far, if you're this far off that curve, if you're this far off that curve when you're 50 or 55, That curve gets wider and wider and wider. So when you're 65 and 75, you're not even close anymore. We got to keep you tight to perfect at 50 so that when you're 75, you're not that far off the curve.

Yeah, yeah, because it just makes me sick, like people in nursing homes, and they just almost discarded, you know.

They are.

And the key is, is to stay out of the nursing home and have a, you know, a amazing vitality and enjoy life longer.

Yeah, functional life. It was functional medicine for a functional life.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Um, are there any therapies you would not use peptides with?

So the controversy— I don't know that I— I don't know that my mind wouldn't use peptides for certain therapies, but I know out there there's a lot of concern. And some of those, like we said before, cancer, which I don't know that I 100% buy into, but I practice a little bit defensively for that purpose. If somebody says, listen, I don't want to do any kind of growth hormone secretagogues because I've had a history of cancer, I respect that. I'll listen to that. I think though the side effects are low, the receptors are all there for this. These are things that the body's used to having. They're not doing it in super physiological doses. So I work with the body. I personally I'm out on a little bit more of a limb than most. I don't have a lot of fear with these.

No, and that's what I think, and I tell patients, you know, or just people, I— we've never been sued. We don't harm people. I mean, and I loved— I went to Dr. Robbins, and he does direct ozone, and he tells patients, I can take out my prescription pad and kill you with it, and nothing will happen to me because that is an experiment. Expected side effect. With what we do, if we harm anyone, we're in trouble, right? But it just shows the safety of these things that— and the risk-benefit is just crazy high.

We're outside the norm in what we do, you and I. We're outside the norm, and I think that's exceptional. And so I'm outside the norm, so I know I have a slight— maybe not a glaring bullseye, but I got a little bit of a bullseye on my back. So if I do anything this much wrong, it's gonna come back and bite me. And I'm not afraid of peptides. So what does that say? I have no fear of the peptides.

Yeah, yeah, we're all scared of regulatory officials that are practicing medicine 30 years ago and don't understand what we're doing, right? But I think it's awesome, all the stuff that you're doing and just your passion for helping really anyone that walks through your door. You know, from the sickest of the sick to someone that wants to live the best life they can, I think is just so impressive. So I appreciate you spending time with us, and I'm sure people get a lot out of this. So thank you.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It was a great time. Thanks for joining us on the Peptides and Longevity Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners passionate about optimizing their health. For more insights, resources, and updates, visit our website at www.wholetorfmed.com.

Together, let's embrace a future of health and vitality. Until next time, stay inspired and keep thriving.