Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Dr. Joel Rosen: Alright, Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of the less stress life where we teach exhausted and burnt-out adults the truth about adrenal fatigue so that they can get their health back very quickly. And I’m really excited to be joined by Don Moxley. He’s the director of the applied science and brand division at longevity labs Inc. in May 2020, he began working with longevity labs. As a nutritional supplement company founded in Austria, Maine, his role is the director of applied science and brand development, their flagship product, which we’ll be talking about, not just in terms of what it is spermidine life, how it is used in terms of balancing growth and building with recycling and clearing out or M tour and autophagy.
And that’s going to be our main topic. But ultimately spermidine life is a daily nutritional supplement that has been shown to trigger a key element in longevity, which is called the toffee G. Hey, Don, thank you so much for being here today.
Don Moxley: It’s my pleasure. I’m really excited to be on the podcast and talk to your listeners.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, we were just geeking out a little bit before we got started here. And you were telling me about your background and how you were in exercise science. So why don’t you tell our listeners who are exhausted and burnt out a little bit of your own story?
Don Moxley: So my background, I’m trained as an exercise physiologist, and I’ve spent 25 of the last 35 years is either an adjunct or an assistant professor teaching the Exercise Sciences in a couple of different institutions. But while I’ve been teaching, I’ve also kept a foot in the industry, particularly in the wearable industry. And I’ve also spent a lot of time working with high-performance athletics back. Back early on, I worked with the Chicago Bulls, and this was back with the Jordan bulls. And I had two players on that team that were I’m an Ohio State guy. I graduated from Ohio State I wrestled at Ohio State.
And that’s right, where did most of my work. So you’ve got you to know, that provides the connection. So I had two players on that team that we worked with all the way up to where in my last direct work, I was a sports scientist with the Ohio State University athletic program with their wrestling program from 15 through 18. In 2000, in the 2017 18 seasons, we measured three and a half million data points on our wrestling team. And one of the big things that came out of it that really ties into our discussion today was understanding heart rate variability and heart rates, very abilities, ability to diagnose problems with, with athletes that are underperforming, we could use it for exercise, prescription understanding, when do we go to the whip, when do we turn things back, but we could also use it and you can also use it in the selection, we learn things.
You know, we learn things that you could actually use HRV for selection because if someone does not have the capability to recover, during either the big 10 or the national tournament, and they can’t make all American Well, we now we figured out that you’ve got to have about 75 milliseconds of RMS SD and your HRV to make all American and if you don’t have it, you won’t make it and we have we had with several data points to suggest that. So became kind of a knot in HRV. And the understanding recovery in my family. We’ve had issues in our family with post-traumatic stress.
And you know, so whether you’re working with an Olympian or working with someone who has severe post-traumatic stress, you’re just on the other end of the same continuum. And the tools that we use with my Olympians, or this in my national champions, are the same tools we use with those that are just struggling to, to get through the day and deal with the burnout that so many people deal with.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, HRV has come a long way, I guess in terms of the ivory towers now into the 30,000 view foot, not even weekend warrior, but the person who’s exhausted and burnt out and just isn’t getting answers. And that’s who I see the dawn in terms of they’ve been to 510 15 doctors, their blood tests are quote-unquote, normal, yet they feel like crap, and they’re looking for solutions. And all of them that I initially encounter have 1001 different supplements in their pantry.
And it’s not for the lack of trying or desire to get better or willingness to try so many different things. It’s just they haven’t cracked the code if you will, and I think what you’re what we’ll be talking about today and transitioning From what you just told me, now you have the spermidine life and you have a product that really kicks into a toughie, G. Why don’t you kind of segue from our talk and segue from the shift that you made, and how it how that got originated, what the genesis of that was?
Don Moxley: Well, what’s interesting about it, so, again, we were talking beforehand, I left Ohio State in 2018, frankly, because they weren’t ready for the work that I was doing. Um, and, and that can be challenging, but it was a great experience I had, I mean, I really enjoyed it, we learned a lot. But I actually moved down into your neighborhood, I was living down in North Palm Beach working in the cannabis business. Because while I was doing the HRV work, you know, I had, I had peers in the pros, that were asking, Hey, are you looking at cannabis with your athletes and my athletes were NCAA athletes. So cannabis was off the table.
But through a connection of a connection, I was invited to come down into that business, and I, you know, I drove and dove into the deep end of the pot pool. And you know, when you start understanding HRV, you have to understand the endocannabinoid system, you have to understand these recovery tools. And it was just a wonderful lesson. I mean, I listen, I don’t I don’t know where you’re at spiritually. But I have, I believe I have a lot of angels looking out for me, and I try to keep my radar as open as possible and go where directed. And it was a great experience, to really dig into that space. And while I was in that space, I met, I get a call one day from a guy saying, Hey, what are you doing?
And you know, I was building a brand down there in Florida for one of the cannabis companies in the medical space. And he said we’ve got this new molecule. And, and Dr. Rosen, I, I was I passively recognized the term autophagy. I had never heard of the word spermidine. And so but I trusted this guy, and I started to dig in. And, and the awakening was really interesting. And, you know, I talk about the fact that I’ve taught, I’ve taught 20 You know, I’ve taught in the last 30 years, 35 years. And when you teach exercise science, inevitably you wind up teaching a nutrition class.
And I’ve taught nutrition, I don’t know a dozen times. And typically when we teach nutrition, I call it Wardwell nutrition because one of the leading textbooks in nutrition is by Wardwell. And it’s the classic macronutrients micronutrients how to read a food label baloney when you don’t teach about baloney but it’s that was you know, it’s a BS term. And while I was passive why passively recognize the term autophagy, you can’t dig into spermidine and not have a deep understanding of autophagy. So that was interesting. And I thought back well, I’ve been teaching nutrition for 30 years now.
And typically in nutrition, you teach a nutrient, and here’s the effect of the nutrient proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and water. That’s the typical course. Right? And listen, we teach about vitamin C, because in the 14 to 16 hundred’s, we’re packing people on the boats, they were on the water for a long time, they developed a condition called scurvy. But we figured out if they took lines with them and lemons and citrus, it wasn’t as bad. Well, that’s where we discovered vitamin C, we learned about vitamin E with prisoners and in Japan, we learned so we learn about these micronutrients and their effect. Well, I believe now listen, I research typically it takes 15 to 17 years for research to make its way into what’s called standard of care and medicine.
And the research that’s going on today won’t be part of the standard of care in medicine for 15 years while I’m looking forward to the first nutritional textbook that teaches about the condition of tautology and the fact that you get a tautology not through what you eat, but when what you don’t eat and when you don’t eat. I think that’s a really important part that’s got to come along and we’re early on. I don’t expect to see this textbook for 10 years. But I think it’s an important part of progressive nutrition.
And then we start to look at so we understand calorie restriction, and it’s in Packed on autophagy, now we can start to look at what’s called calorie restriction mimetics. What are nutrients that we can take in that stimulate a toughie G. And spermidine is one of those, um, you know, spermidine is this molecule it’s in every cell of your body men, women, plants and animals. It’s low at birth had peaked about 30, and declines from there on out. But people who age well into their 90s and Centurions have high sperm and iron levels.
And we know that populations that consume high spermidine foods in their diets have higher spermidine levels. And oh, by the way, they live longer, too, we see this in the Blue Zone work. So um, so that’s, you know, that’s kind of how I go from, you know, doing HRV on a bunch of college wrestlers, through selling weed in South Florida into cannabis. You know, there’s a, there’s a connection there. And that’s that connection about helping people live their best lives. And that’s kind of how I operate.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no, that’s an awesome story. There’s a lot of lessons just in that itself, I mean, teaching something for 35 years, and being humble enough to know that what you don’t know, is still something that you can learn which a lot of people that are exhausted and burnt out labeled themselves like this, that or the other, and they become labeled, and they become crabs in the bucket. And they don’t want to let the other people get pulled out because they’re identifying with that term.
And I think that’s similar to what you said, the other lesson was listening to your little angels and knowing like, if it doesn’t, if it doesn’t pass the spidey senses and your tingling, then you know, there’s something inherent to listen to, I’m just going to review a little bit for some of the listeners that may not know, and I’ve taught it before, but HRV heart rate variability, you know, the 32nd commercial is, it’s the cadence or the beats between the beats.
And if you’re under sympathetic dominance, you’re gonna have a very low HRV, because it’s, boom, boom, boom, boom, very quick, even though it doesn’t tell you your pulse rate, it just tells you what are the variants between the beats exists, if you’re very adaptable, metaphorically, as well as physiologically, and you can tap into parasympathetic activity, your variance between the beats will be higher. And that’s going to be a better score and a better indication of recovery, a better indication of adaptability, and also not necessarily being under constant fight or flight hormones, which the people that we listen to are, are continually under stress. So I just wanted to kind of clarify that for the listener. Now, what I wanted to kind of get into was, as far as what autophagy is, and then on the flip side, what m tour is, and growth factors.
And I really liked the idea of what you’ve said, it’s not so much and I agree with you sacred cows of the macronutrients and the small meals more frequently to keep your sugar levels stable, although they’re always high. And, you know, the food bullshit, excuse the language pyramid and how, you know, ketchup is one of them, you know, the vegetables on the pyramid, and the RTA. And it’s just these are sacred cows that need to topple by now, already, as far as things go. But as far as the question I’m going to get to is, why why is it so important, as you’re seeing in your research, to be able to tap into a tautology, and how you need to do that with, with not putting your foot on the gas pedal on the brakes at the same time?
Don Moxley: Well, it’s important for the listener to recognize the fact that autophagy when we start talking about autophagy, is a relatively recent discovery, they just gave a Nobel Prize in 2017, to a Japanese researcher that described the processes of autophagy. So the autophagy on the parts that take place in the cell. This is a relatively new science. And now we started to look when you look at longevity research, what we see is that autophagy is one of these. It’s a key element to longevity, that that right now, the only experimental manipulation that you can really do that legitimately extends longevity is calorie restriction.
And this is science. Now, remember, this is a relatively new science to that Clive McKay at Cornell. Back in the mid-50s. He ran out of money in the lab he had he couldn’t feed all his rats. So he fed one set of rats a full diet, he cut the diet on the other half of the rats, and the rats that were getting the partial diet did better than the full feed. It was one of the first places that we see the experimental application of calories. restriction? Well, this has evolved over time it’s taken a while, you know, they did a paper in, in the early 2000s, looking at the 50th anniversary of McKay, and looking at McKay’s work, and we’re starting to see that really start to pop out in the literature as well. But we’re starting to see, we’re starting to see researchers figure out why what is it about calorie restriction that leads to improved longevity? Well, it’s this autophagy process.
And now we’re starting to see some of the autophagy research. Listen, we’ve got some papers in spermidine, and autophagy work that was spermidine supplementation and the increase of autophagy, we see an improvement of cognitive performance, we see a thickening of hippocampal thickness in the brain, which is improved memory, we see improved cardiovascular fitness. Listen, there’s a great paper that I’ll put out there. And I think you can probably put it in the show notes. It’s called spermidine, and health and disease. I think it’s one of the best review papers, when you take a look at cardiovascular benefit, neural benefit, stem cell production increase, there are all these key elements that are a byproduct of the spermidine supplementation and triggering the autophagy process.
And if you think about this, you know, listen, we live in a society now that is energy toxic, we have so much energy around us. It’s leading to toxicity. And we’re trying to understand why that is. And listen, um, when you look at all timers are some of these dementia-based diseases. Listen, we don’t have a dementia drug. the problem in society, we have an energy issue that we have to pay attention to we have so much junk energy available, that autophagy we never have to trigger autophagy, and what we’re finding is that autophagy is a key element. Again, I go back to the textbook example that I believe autophagy will be covered it will get a chapter in the textbooks. What is the toffee g? How do you stimulate it? What are the key elements, and you stimulate it not by what you eat, but what you don’t eat many times, and now we’re starting to see mimetics We’re so you know, again, we see spermidine, we know Sperma nine decreases with age.
And if we and even if you are fasting, if you have low sperm, nine levels consuming sperm, and it increases the autophagy process. We know that now we’re continuing to dive into that research. Again, we’ve got to do most of our work and model organisms, we got secondary indicators in humans. But it’s again, we’re sitting on one of these cutting-edge research elements. That’s really exciting.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, it is really exciting. And you know, we have very similar backgrounds in the Exercise Sciences. And I think we both agree that the original biohackers, well, not the original, but the 1970 biohackers were the bodybuilders and the people that could understand that you just don’t continue to lift weights, you have to go through periodization and you have to go through hypertrophy, and then you have to go through rest and recovery and building and growing. And then come Yang and Yang.
And there’s a really important theory, I mean, that goes back to 1000s of years of ancient Chinese or Chinese medicine and Yang Yin Yang. And what I find is genetics haven’t changed at all. But environmentally has changed crazy wise, energetically wise. And we have too many growth factors that stimulate and I tell people like autophagy is really easy to think of thinking about it as the farmer harvest his his his crops at the end of the season. And then he’ll plow the fields and he’ll help the cells or the plants or the stock that didn’t get used up and it will get recycled back into the soils.
And the parts that weren’t used will be composted and reused, just like our body needs to do that. And if we’re not able to clear out these dead cells and these folded proteins and these, I guess, if you will these bacteria or these microorganisms, then you’re not going to be able to recover and rebuild when it comes time. But even more alarming is what we see now are things like iron or Richmond in our foods. glyphosate lowering glutamate, bacteria and in our microbiome, plastics, and BPA is growth hormones and antibiotics and pesticides, you know, just so many things that stimulate the growth factors that it makes it that much more important to be able to tap into a tapa G. So maybe why don’t you teach us exactly Okay, well, where does spermidine fit in?
Because a lot of the people that we work with, the doctors aren’t giving them answers, and they’ve had to become their own advocates. And they really do enjoy not the feeling crappy part of it. But the research and the AHA is that they have of Oh, my gosh, I wish I would have known this earlier. I’ve been taught this as you said, so where is spermidine? For the listeners fitting in in terms of why does it stimulate autophagy?
Don Moxley: Well, the reason spermine is it, what we understand now is it’s a clear autophagy trigger. There’s a set of proteins when we start talking about spermidine. So if you’ve read David Sinclair’s book on lifespan, or if you’ve looked at whether it’s Valter Longo, his book on the longevity diet and the in the fasting, mimicking diet there, you know, there’s a lot of research and starting to touch around the edge of this. But what we know is spermidine is a key trigger to some of the genes that trigger the autophagy pathway.
And these this is significant, it’s more than just the sirtuins or the backlands it’s playing a whole set and I’m not going to go down the genetic rabbit hole here. But it this is happening intracellularly It’s a molecule that needs to be present. Now, what we find is in long-lived populations, they typically are consuming spermidine-rich diets, you find spermidine in the fermented soy product, NATO and if you’ve grown up Japanese and that’s been part of your diet, go crazy. Um, if you’ve grown up in the states and you’ve never had it, it’s you’re gonna find it disgusting. It’s pretty hard to choke down. Or we see it in we extract ours from wheat germ, but we get it from European we German we’ve not been able to do it in the states yet.
And we’re looking, but are we germ is coming from middle Europe, Austria, southern Germany, Northern Italy, Switzerland, the Europeans are much tougher on glyphosate. So we’re able and there’s a range. So a big part of what our company does is, first of all, we have to find spermidine rich fields, not all wheat germ is the same, then we bring that in and we have to we eliminate probably half of what we bring in because the spermidine content isn’t high enough to refine and then what we have, then we refine it with a water-based process, the only thing we use is water and creating our spermidine rich supplement. You can eat wheat germ, you can eat soybeans, you can eat a lot, there are mushrooms that have high permanent contents.
The problem is you don’t know what the content of the spermidine in the product is. That’s the challenge. And that’s what’s created the opportunity for us. So and I want to jump back because you asked me earlier. So autophagy and mtorr. So what we know and you and I have both of you know when you’re working with athletes, you’re typically dealing with someone who’s 30 years or younger, we’re dealing with someone that’s 15 to 25. Maybe if you’ve got a long live pro or someone like that. And you know what, when you’re eating small meals multiple times a day, you are feeding the mTOR pathway, your body is going to be cranking out proteins, there are no two ways about it.
The problem is this. When your body makes protein, it doesn’t make them all the same, and it doesn’t make them all correctly. So if your ribosome Krebs cranks out this one protein with one of the amino acids, that’s not correct, that protein won’t go in won’t go into you. So it’ll just sit there in the cell. This is the beauty of the autophagy process is that when there is a demand made on the system, there’s calorie restriction and there’s energy demand. This is when the autophagy process kicks in and says, oh, let’s go clean up these old proteins that aren’t very valuable anymore.
And let’s go clean up these mitochondria, or these other organelles that just aren’t valuable anymore. And let’s clean that up and let’s put their parts back into circulation as either energy or to build with and that’s where we get a really healthy process. I’m personally most excited about understanding the role of autophagy in dementia in some of these Alzheimer ‘s-like diseases. We’ve got a lot there’s there are two great papers that just came out in the last month looking at this, and that people who consume high sperm and iron levels have lower levels of dementia. And we see an increase in cortical thickness in Alzheimer’s disease.
parts of the brain that get attacked. So you know what, that’s where I’m most excited. We have a paper that came out, I’m not sure it’s in print yet it’s been accepted. But we see that when you have sperm and iron supplementation, you see an improvement in an in toffee G and immune response, particularly with COVID. We see an improvement we so we see the fact that it’s that the immune system is stopping the transmission of that virus at 85 90% of the time.
So we’ve actually got some studies going on in Europe right now looking at this so so clearly, this, as you said earlier, improved the toffee g winds up improving immunity, it winds up improving neural performance, it winds up improving cardiovascular performance, we see an increase in nitric oxide, we see an increase in Appa endothelial cell production and quality.
But we also see an improvement in epithelial stem cells. So when people start taking spermidine, one of the first things they report is improved Hair, Skin, and Nails. your fingernails start growing like crazy, your hair grows faster, and your skin gets better. So that’s one of the benefits that it’s one of the first things we see with the product.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. I’d love to kind of get into you because we’re where I’m, I’m in the field, as the field general, right? So I’m working with clients that are exhausted and burnt out. And by the way, I know that COVID is replicated through m tour. And so if we have all these m tour signaling pathways always being turned on, you are going to have more neural degeneration, more inflammation, more problems. So really, what I want to teach them and learning right now in real-time, is what is the sweet spot?
And there’s no textbook answer in terms of, Okay, how many days do we want to end the tour is not bad, I mean, pregnant, just state, if they didn’t have mtorr, bodybuilders wouldn’t grow, we wouldn’t be able to repair our bodies. This is where now we can link back the HRV to see which way we’re trending to know, hey, I gotta switch this up, if I’ve been doing too much, a toughie, G. And I’ve been too much caloric restricting. And I haven’t been getting my proteins. And I’ve been doing too many things that are cleansing or recycling cells, maybe my heart rate variability starts to slow down or drop. And
Don Moxley: actually, the more I fast, the lower my HRV gets. So when you’re listening, your body recognizes fasting as calorie restriction or fasting is a threat. Your body sees that as a threat. So you’re going to see a drop in HRV, you’re going to see the body say, Hey, we need to get energy. So it’s going to cause you to naturally try to spin out your own energy sources. And listen, that’s one of the beauties when we start to get fat metabolism and we get the beta-hydroxybutyrate. And we get the alpha-ketoglutarate.
And we get the great ketone bodies created. We get sharp mentally, it’s one of the benefits. So So yeah, and what’s going to be interesting as the research goes on, you know, listen, our body likes cycles. It loves cycles, it does not like being static. And when you look at the diurnal process, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to see autophagy linked to the diurnal process. So we’re going to continue to work our way through this and understand this better. One of our challenges right now is we don’t have a great, tougher gene marker. I can’t, I can’t take your blood, I can’t put a wearable on you.
It’s a challenge now. And you know, when we look at fasting, I don’t know what you see with your customers. But, you know, I know when I first started fasting, I was actually living down just north of you. In a one-bedroom apartment by myself, I didn’t have any family that I was having to work with. So doing some kind of crazy meal manipulation was really easy for me. Now that I’m back up north, I live with my wife. She works a little different schedule than I work. My daughter who’s now just finished up her first year of graduate school is back living with us. So coordinating family meals with three different schedules, and fasting can be a challenge.
Now and I don’t know about you the first time I fasted you know I got to where I was going 3045 60 days of solid 18 six, throwing in 24 and 48 hour fasts at least once a week. And I felt great. Wow. What we’re seeing though, is that people who are fasting too much are starting to see a drop in lean mass. And that drop in lean mass that’s Listen, you’ve got to maintain muscle. lean mass for longevity. It’s the number one predictor of quality life is strength and power.
So you want that mtorr process. But we need the toffee g process to constantly clean those cells and make sure that we’re not fighting, that our cells are able to fight the immune process that’s going on that the rest of our body has to protect against. Does that make sense?
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no, it says, it just speaks to the yin and yang of everything. There’s a Goldilocks zone of not too little, not too much. I think it first comes down to dawn, the fact that what is your goal, and what is your number one challenge, like, if you’re catabolic, and you have problems putting on weight, then you’re going to want to emphasize a little bit more your m tour strategies. Whereas if you’re overweight and insulin resistant, like 75% of the population, yeah, and I think those are surrogate markers, I agree with you.
There are not specific markers, I think there are really good surrogate markers that are correlated with if you’re in a toughie g like knowing about your ketone levels or your glucose ketone index, I think those are good insulin growth factors and fasting insulin are good mtorr markers. But it comes down to what is your personal goal? What’s your age? What are your health challenges? And I agree with you in terms of not just circadian rhythms. But you know, over the millennia, how our bodies have been engineered for feast and famine and how we go through periods of abundance.
And those are the years where we’re harvesting our crops. And we’re able to go through indulgence, I’m sure that certainly the season, certainly the seed, maybe not the season, yes, the seasons, the seasons. And you know, there weren’t refrigerators or 24-hour delivery services, or all of these, you know, lights that would stimulate our pineal gland and create melatonin shifts. So I think we’re dealing with a lot more environmental cues that throw us out of the natural rhythm, and we’ve lost the coherence with the earth. And it takes a behooves us to be that much more aligned with what we have to do proactively.
So I guess the question would be the as far as developing protocols around that, I am teaching my audience and the people that I coach one on one, once we do get a genetic blueprint of what your potentials are, what your susceptibilities are, what rocks to look under, once we get an idea of your, if you will, your scorecard of what are your variables or your analytes that are not just laboratory high or low, but are functionally trending towards a C minus versus a failing grade, and be able to assess what’s going on there. And then be able to come up with a protocol of not driving with your foot on the gas and the brakes at the same time.
And that means, okay, I don’t want you to be doing all of these mtorr stimulating nutrients, lots of proteins, lots of carbs, lots of B vitamins, not regulating your iron. I personally don’t feel that mtorr will ever be shifted off in today’s day and age just because of emf themselves.
Don Moxley: Well, I don’t for you don’t want it Listen, when mTOR shuts down, you’re dead pretty quick. You’ve got I mean, our we’re constantly reforming proteins in our body. The challenge is, is that we know that we make a bad protein, there’s a bad protein ratio, that starts to build up. We’ve got to constantly replace that. So again, it’s your yin and yang constantly driving that process.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Right? Right. So as far as though in your bio, it says that it can be used every day. So I’m just going to be ignorant of this fact and sincerely ask the question. If I don’t want to constantly like I agree as you’ll never turn off mtorr if you could just slow it down enough so that autophagy can actually kick in or don’t overfeed it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Don’t overfeed. But like, how is your experience anecdotally or with this research that the spermidine is doing?
It’s a supplement for daily intake because I’m open to changing my thought process. I really like to use these surrogate markers and these wearables and these data tracking to get an idea and of course, looking at the scorecard how they change and most importantly, subjectively, how are you doing? But I also realize that like you just said, there’s a Cinderella zone or Goldilocks zone of you just can’t be in autophagy all the time, but spermidine life is a product that has been shown to be able to allow m tour go Even though you’re using an autophagy based product every day,
Don Moxley: well, remember spermine nine is going to trigger that. And you’re always going to have the pressures back and forth that with calorie consumption, you’re going to get the insulin-like growth factors, the insulin, you’re going to get the triggers for autophagy, if you then are going to calorie restrict as well, naturally, put that into your diet, you’ve got to have the underlying molecules.
Listen, we don’t need to supplement mtorr it’s in the cellar. Wait, we haven’t figured this out yet. It’s what we know is that there’s been plenty, you know, we don’t need Rictor or Raptor, whether it’s m torque one or M torque two.
So that being said, what we know is that as spermidine drops, autophagy drops. And if you think of protein development, as well as autophagy, being cyclical, you’re going to see those two pressuring each other back and forth. But in the absence of spermidine, the pressure stays on the mtorr side, it doesn’t shift over to the autophagy side. So what we’re finding from our research is that there needs to be a serum level and that we supplement at that level.
I look at you know, I don’t know if you do work with Senolytics whether it’s five to 10, of course, a 10 or, or things like that when we look at the elimination of senescence cells. You know, senescence cells are important from time to time, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of you know, our bodies can stop cancer with senescence cells, so we don’t want to just wipe out our senescent cells, but we do want to clean them out every once in a while. That’s the reason I like that Mayo product Mayo Clinic protocol of using Feiss attendant quercetin for a couple of days take a couple of weeks off and letting the senescent cells do what they need to do. So when we start looking at m tour production versus a tapa G, I think the cycle is shorter.
I think it’s I personally feel it falls into that diurnal process, I’m going to build proteins while I’m feeding, and I’m going to trigger autophagy, some period of time after I stopped feeding. And this is the value of that 16 818, six, maybe 24. Listen, we can’t starve ourselves to immortality. Um, you know, there’s a process that comes in there. And I think it’s important and the what we see spermidine is being a, a base level that declines with age. So it’s about improving that third, third.
Now, I want to go let me go address this a little bit for you. Because when we because you said something earlier that I think is really important. What are your goals? What are your objectives? You know, there was a period of time prior to becoming a father, when I was spending a lot of time worrying about what I look like or as an athlete training to be an athlete and be big and strong and do some of these things. But now that I am, I think of life in three thirds.
The first third we spend learning and the second third, we spend in service to others either as work or, or raising our families. But then there’s a third of life. My wife and I are getting ready to go into that my daughter, you know, we have one child and she’s finishing up grad school. So she will move out of our house probably permanently in a year. And she and I, I don’t ever listen, I love to work. I love what I’m doing. I hope I never retire because I love learning. And this is just the place I like to be. But I’m moving into my third when I’m doing things that I choose to do for myself, not for others, you know, that trip of a lifetime, or I can’t wait.
I told someone the other day. One of the greatest things I enjoyed wasn’t coaching. You know, I’ve coached a lot of kids and a lot of levels. My, my most favorite coaching experience was when I coach my daughter’s eighth-grade field hockey team. It was it was wonderful. And I’ve come in again, I’ve coached Olympians in wrestling, I’ve coached multiple national champions I’ve worked on eighth-grade field hockey was the best. And I’m looking forward to coaching my grandchild’s eighth-grade field hockey team.
So all of a sudden my purpose now I’m actually it’s funny that we got into this because I have an outline for a book that we are putting together called the hallmarks of longevity science. And when we look at the hallmarks I have Are you familiar with Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Well, you’re familiar with his rocks in the jar analogy, right, right. Yeah. What are the big rocks in the jar? In my mind, the four big rocks in the jar are exercises, you cannot ignore them. But the note I have next exercise is to stop exercising to lose weight. Note nobody takes a picture of their scale and hangs it on the wall.
Okay, it’s a horrible goal exercise for what I call trainable life events. that it could be a 3k it could be a 10k it could be a vacation, my trainable life events now I’m starting to train for my daughter’s wedding and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren. That’s so my goals have shifted to clearly healthspan lifespan, Not I, you know, I’ve lifted lots of weights. I mean, I used to train with Lou Simmons at Westside barbell before it was Westside You know, I’ve moved lots of weight I’ve completed. I’m beyond that. So now all of a sudden, my objectives have shifted to longevity. I am very insulin resistant, I’m diagnosed as a type two diabetic I have to pay attention.
I’m, you know, listen, if a mad famine kicked in you skinny little muscular types, you know, you’re going to be gone before us fat efficient guys go. So. But when we live in an energy toxic environment, I have to be careful. So I’m shifting into my third, we’re looking at what happens hormones. Let me go back to the four rocks exercise. I don’t exercise to benchpress and squat anymore. I exercise for mobility and safety and I exercise for mitochondria production.
So I’ve shifted from my cardio work to where it’s where zone three, four, and five, two are my cardio work is zone two and three now because I’m trying to feed my mitochondria all I can. So exercise, the second rock in the jar, and my book is is food from unprocessed sources. I don’t I don’t get into a vegan carnivore. I feel like I’ve made the statement that in the absence of extinction, there’s there is no evolution, there’s only diversity. And I believe it’s fair that with the diversity we have, some people may do better vegan, some people may be doing better carnivore.
And as you said, you got to figure out what works for you. But what we can agree on is, the more you process food, the worse it is for you. So trying to get stuff, you know, farm to table as much as possible. My third rock in the jar, we put to sleep we call it to sleep, it’s recovery. It’s understanding stress and recovery. I do a lot of work with meditation and floating. And these are key elements for dealing with boosting parasympathetic reaction and recognizing the sympathetic in our lives and factors. You can’t fix bad sleep, you can’t hack, you have to have good sleep, then you can put Caxton on top of that. And then my fourth rock is photobiomodulation I think the amount of light that we get on our skin has become a problem.
So those are my four big rocks. And when you look at longevity, the jar that they’re going into I call purpose, what is your purpose in life. And when you have your purpose, then it gives you a guide for what you do with those four big rocks. And we can bring other things in. I mean, so there are nutritional strategies, there are hacks, at the exercise level, there are hacks at the food level, there are hacks at the light level, and there are hacks at the stress and recovery level. So that’s where biohacking comes into play. And it’s important because our environment has driven us away from our genes from our genetic optimization. You know, you and I were talking earlier about their air conditioning and living in South Florida.
And, you know, Homo sapiens were successful, the genetic set that we have, we’re successful over Neanderthals because we adapted better. Okay, so our genetics, love adaptation. Well, unfortunately, now live environments where we don’t have to adapt. We live in houses with flat floors and don’t even have stairs, you know, so why do people have so many back problems, because they don’t have to pick their knee up above 90 degrees to climb anymore.
So their iliopsoas has spasming and it’s crossing over the sciatic nerve in two different places. And they’re coming to you to get fixed. And the fact is, they should just climb more I mean, if you need that environment, we live in environments that you know, the temperature in our house between summer and winter, when the temperature outside very 60 degrees, our temperature inside varies four degrees. And that’s a problem. It’s we have to hack that somehow. So we understand the value of Heat Shock proteins and cold shock proteins. You know, if you’re watching this and not listening to it, you look over my right shoulder, you see my sauna. You know, it’s important it’s one of them.
It’s one of my important hacks. So you know, that’s where I go back to, you have to have a purpose. You have to have those things that you’re focused on that put pictures on the wall about how you define yourself, and then that will help drive those four key elements. And one of those hacks is understanding, you know, we in our diets, we don’t have enough spermidine. Now, if you live in a Blue Zone, maybe you do and you don’t have to worry about it, but what we found is the rest of us don’t.
And this is what’s that combined with caloric toxicity. We have to hack our way to figure this out so that we can get back into the mtorr, anabolic, the autophagy catabolic process. And spermidine life just happens to be one of those molecules.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no, that’s a great answer. And I’m thinking to myself, we’ll have to definitely do a part two because I have so many questions to ask you in that. But you know, as complicated as some of the terms you used are Don. It’s not rocket science, right? I mean, common sense ain’t so calm.
And when, when we’re not moving, and we’re isolating and we’re where we’re, anyways, that’s a whole other slippery slope. But we do need to move right? We need to be assertive.
Don Moxley: Go back. Listen, let’s go back to the jar and the four rocks. Okay. It starts with purpose. Yeah. And you know what, you have to sit back and decide my purpose in life is not working for someone else. I have I you know, it was interesting for me when I left Ohio State back in 2018. It was hard because I did not I didn’t want to leave. But you know, Listen, I’ve got the Ohio State tattoo. You know, I’ve my both my brothers went there. My daughter went there. You know, my brother in my parents, sons, and grandsons. We have 16 varsity letters from Ohio State.
We have nine degrees and 16 varsity letters. We all my two brothers and I met our wives there. We’ve got 97 years of marriage, from relationships that we developed at Ohio State, we are true blue and it hurt to leave. But I feel like the universe pushed me away. It said your work here is done. And so I had to sit back and figure out what my purpose is and when you look at my LinkedIn description, you’ll see that I help understand individuals make decisions that lead to the reduction of suffering and the promotion of well people you know, that’s kind of things and, and so while I have a degree in exercise, physiology, understanding mtorr and understanding these things are key.
So the purpose is critical. Listen, pick up something heavy every once in a while, like twice a week, just pick-ups. Don’t get caught up in whether I’m doing CrossFit or something else. Pick up something heavy, make it a regular part. And oh, by the way, go walk. Those two things are transformative. If you have challenges with those and you need to your invite your environment is right. Well maybe you need to put a peloton bike in so you have access to it. Maybe you need to put in some kind of a piece of equipment to help pick up something heavy. It’s listening for me exercise is that simple.
You can throw in yoga on top of that you can throw in a lot of these other things, but pick up something heavy and walk when we look at nutrition. Just start getting your food from unprocessed sources quit buying your meals out of your car window. Start you know you have to learn how to cook Okay, you have to learn and the more you cook, the better you’re able to acquire food from unprocessed sources. When we take a look at sleep and stress learn to go to bed without a TV in your room turn off the lights get the bed at the same time on a regular basis. You know I used to love to sit up and watch you know the tonight show and those shows I used to really enjoy that but you know what?
When I understand sleep and recovery I have a DVR and if I really need to see if it’s there on the internet and I can get it when the when those when the sun’s up and then finally light listen when I was living in Florida um I am a brown being I am I have a Native American background and the sun my skin loves the sun but when I’m up north I have to have hacks for that my wife and I have a Juve unit we put in near-infrared unit one of the most my Juve unit will lower my blood sugar more than insulin.
Think about that. Now I’m not an insight I had bad knee surgery back in September I want it with a Mersa infection from so I was very ill in September and October and I couldn’t walk and my diet was horrible in my blood sugar got out of control and I had to start to use insulin just to maintain that. Well, I’ve stopped using it now because I’m doing it all with movement and with what I eat, but you know, I pay close attention to what I use this CGM, and light is going to become even more dramatic as we move on. So. So those are the four big rocks, but they go into a jar called purpose.
Dr. Joel Rosen: And that’s the awesome answer, I would just elaborate your fourth rock on Photomodulation and put frequency modulation and frequency awareness because EMF’s You know, that’s a specially with 5g that’s a whole other conversation. But that has been shown to stimulate mtorr. It has been shown to cause insulin spikes, and we are bombarded by it on a daily basis and there’s no escaping it. But we can certainly be proactive with it, we can put our phones on airplane mode, we can put our routers on a wireless timer, or we can resync it up to the wires. We can have a two-day three day week sabbatical.
And we’ll still live you know, we grew up with these things without having these things. But there’s I got a run, I appreciate your time, I will put a link to be able to how to access getting spermidine under the show notes so that people can try it. And I would hope that you and I can meet Don for part two because I have so much more to go with you. But I appreciate your time. And I appreciate all that you’re doing. I love your mission and your purpose. And I just want to thank you for being here today.
Don Moxley: Well, again, I really appreciate the opportunity. I’m looking forward to the next one. And spermidine life if you’re looking online, there’ll be a link in the show notes. But spermidine life.us. If you go to spermidine life calm, you’ll go to our Austrian site. We don’t have the geo-locating worked out yet. But if you want to see it if if you don’t speak German, it’s better to go to spermidine live.us. That’s our US site and kind of where we operate.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Awesome. Thank you so much, Don. I appreciate it. Have a great day. You too.