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Dr. Joel Rosen: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another edition about the truth about your health podcast where we’re on a mission to expose the truth about your health, especially for burnt-out men and women so that they can be empowered to get their energy back and go from exhausted to energized. And we’re excited to do part two with my buddy Don Moxley, we had part one, which we’ll put in the show notes last August, we got into a deep dive, but two is to introduce Don, he’s the director and applied science and brand development at longevity labs in the United States.
He’s dedicated to helping people live vibrant, fulfilling lives at all ages, and he draws on his career as an athlete, a sports scientist and instructor, lead educator. And now they are diving deep into the science of toffee autophagy and longevity. So, Don, thank you so much for being with us. Once again.
Don Moxley: John, excited to be here and talk to your clan.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, well, I’m excited to have you back because I actually rewatched like I was mentioning earlier, our last interview, and we did really get into the autophagy and longevity and how you first mean you had known about autophagy.
But then when you got hired from spermidine, you had to kind of get into the nitty-gritty of autophagy and longevity. So maybe for some of the listeners that missed the first one, or just don’t quite understand what is a toughie, G, and what is related to longevity, maybe kind of give us a, a one on one on that, Don?
Don Moxley: Well, yeah, that’s a goal. And anyone interested in and again, maximizing your health, extending longevity, it’s difficult to have that conversation or establish that strategy without having some kind of a strategy as it relates to autophagy. So, you know, we’ll start with the definition of autophagy. In the lab, that means self-eating, it’s a self-cleaning process, it’s a cleaning process in the cells, that that, you know, in our cells.
They sense whether nutrients are coming in or not. In our cells, we’ve got this little protein that’s called an mTOR protein. And when mTOR senses that there are nutrients available, mTOR says hey, let’s get to work, and let’s make some protein. So it goes into the DNA, it pulls out a strip of mRNA, that goes into the ribosomes, the ribosomes start bolting together amino acids to make proteins.
And then that protein gets folded in an organelle, called the endoplasmic reticulum, that gets folded in, and not all the proteins are folded correctly. So even though it might be defined correctly, or there might be you know, there might be a little change in it, not all those proteins go into service. And if they don’t, they just sit there in the cell and, and what we start to take a look at, particularly as it relates to longevity, a lot of the diseases, a lot of the problems that we deal with, as we get older morbidity, you know, the increase in lack of health increase in disease, which is morbidity, and mortality death is a function of diseases that are related to a lack of autophagy.
We typically refer to most of these diseases as inflammation-related, we call it inflammation, a lot of times I’ve seen in the press, but anytime that you have low autophagy you have increased inflammation. As you increase autophagy in the cells, you lower inflammation, you improve cellular performance, and this is an immune level at a neuro level at a myocardial level. All of these are taking place as autophagy increases and Joel This is the benefit of fasting.
You know, a lot of times you know, people decide they’re going too fast because they think they want to lose weight, it’s about fewer calories and the fact is that you don’t have to have fewer calories necessarily if you compress your eating into a tighter window. There was really good work done by Dr. Valter Longo that showed that if you know two people on the same diet, one that eats their calories over a shorter period has increased health over the person that eats it over a longer period.
So just you know when it comes to a healthy lifestyle and promoting that, it’s so important to have a strategy as it relates to a toffee G in your life. This means you don’t eat sunup until sundown. You know you spend you know to try and compress your eating. You start by compressing into an eight-hour window So that means you don’t eat for 16, you sleep for 8789 10 hours, and then two hours on the back of that and a few hours on the front of it you are to 16 hours without eating. And then you continually extend that. And there are a lot of health benefits that go with it as it relates to autophagy.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no, that’s a great, great starting point, and tipping off our conversation just to kind of remind the reader, in our last conversation, we were talking about how research doesn’t hit the implementation till 15 to 17 years down the road. Yeah, and autophagy ultimately, is a new concept, right, in 2017, they won a Nobel Prize for its discovery.
And ultimately, that was a good switch or transition that you made, and switch I use the metaphorical term, in terms of switching between growth and repair, and, and recycling and regenerating. So maybe kind of talk about for the listener, like how mTOR and autophagy, which we talked about a little bit last time, but I’m happy to go into it again, is like how they do not coexist, and why maybe having a compressed window allows for the mTOR, to be turned off enough for the autophagy to be turned on enough.
Don Moxley: Well, you know, Joe, our bodies don’t our bodies, like cycles, they like to sleep and wake and feed and not feed and there’s and train, you know, we could we call this you know, hormesis there’s their stimulus that we put in, to disturb homeostasis to, and the body will respond to that. So this is fitting into that group, of challenges or things that the body, we evolved, we didn’t evolve, to have food around all the time.
And part of the benefit of that evolutionary process is the cellular cleaning process that takes place with autophagy. I mean, this, this is a benefit that comes from, you know, not having refrigerators in you know, when we were hunter-gatherers. And, and, and we now live in a time, when we have food, we have food available 24/7 365.
And if you take advantage of that, you’re not the cell is not able to take advantage of this, you stay in this mTOR driven cycle, you stay in this growth cycle, which for part of your life might be a good thing. You know, I remember when I was working with some high school football players are some high school athletes that wanted to gain weight, you know, what, they eat small meals every two hours, and what that’s doing that’s constantly driving them toward development, you put work in on top of it.
So you’re building proteins like crazy that, you know, which as a child as an as a youth that that might be an acceptable process, we also have higher levels of natural autophagy taking place at that time, too. And you know, one of the questions I have Joel and I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I sent this to us to our research panel the other day, that if we, you know, we can get mTOR stimulation, both from nutrients and from mechanical stimulation.
So if I’ve fasted, and I strength train, I will get an mTOR stimulation from the strength training. So the and I don’t, frankly, I don’t know the answer to this yet. But I think it’s a good question is that if I have fasted, and I have downregulated mTOR activity, and I have upregulated autophagy via the attack cycle, if I stimulate autophagy with mechanical stress, excuse me, if I stimulate mTOR with mechanical stress, will I have a co-activated mTOR and autophagy? I found that to be an interesting question.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing you said last time, which makes this so hard is how do you test right? How do I test a toffee G? And how do I tell I mean, you can do certainly insulin-like growth factor and other markers for mTOR and growth. And you’re right, there are different phases of our life. And you even mentioned last time, you need to have muscle strength.
It’s one of the main qualities of healthy living as we get older, so you always want to have it to some extent, and unfortunately, the environment even EMFs are shown to stimulate mTOR iron oxidation, antibiotics hormones in our Cattles, pesticides, and sprays. I mean, you look left, right, and center, high corn syrup, fructose, you know, all these things are stimulating growth like and that’s why it’s amazing when you look at pictures.
I grew up in Canada and There was a Terry Fox Run of a guy who ran across Canada who’s a Canadian hero with cancer with one leg. And you look at all the pictures, and everyone’s skinny, you know, and like everyone is lean. And you look at the pictures now. And there’s a certain amount, like you said, in terms of, we have refrigerators, and we have light bulbs, and we have Amazon Prime. And we also have.
Don Moxley: stimulation, Moscow side food, Costco size food deliveries. Yeah.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Right, exactly. And it’s just like, there’s just so much abundance. But I think to answer your question, I think that I always like the contrast theory, like, if, if you have the frogs in the pot, and they don’t notice the temperature rising, and before, you know, they’re both boiling, when you have that contrast theory of going from a cold tub to a hot tub, the hot tubs a lot hotter than it would have if you just went straight in there, and vice versa. I think if you can intentionally turn off something, you’re going to turn on something that much better.
So I think if you accept, okay, I’m going to exercise in a fasted state. But once I turn on my mTOR, I ride that way for how many days I want to ride it for and then I go back down underneath and do my autophagy strategies. And I don’t think it would be wise to do it every single day. I mean, you have the whole heavy duty. I don’t know if you remember Mike Mensur and the heavy-duty Dorian Yates and kill yourself one workout go back six days later. It’s kind of like you and I talked about that last time is the early biohackers. Were the weightlifters and they understood how things work? I mean, what’s your sense on that?
Don Moxley: Well, I think to listen, you know, I do a talk where I talk about the fact that that you know biohacking is this weird term that we’re all trying to figure out, you know, what, what do we need to Biohack? And my answer to that question is yes. And the reason is, is that you know, when I do this lecture I, I show and I don’t know if I talked about the killer whales last time.
But if you look at the picture of an orca that is in captivity, what you’ll see is that their dorsal fin bends over, and then when you see an orca in the wild, its dorsal fin is straight. And what we learned from that is that there’s not enough environmental force in the aquarium that the Orca lives in to express the DNA as it relates to a straight dorsal fin.
And, and we and we saw with mammals and zoos in the old zoos that were concrete blocks and bars on the front of the cage, those animals lived an average of three and a half years, they were neurotic that digestive diseases there were, you know, there, they sound like humans today, right? But you take that same animal and you put it into an enriched environment in a zoo, these new zoos, and they are living full lives. They are expressing their DNA through reproduction.
They’re, you know, it’s this enriched environment. And so the question I have and I asked, and the reason we have to Biohack is that we all live in aquariums, you know, we’re filming this right now. And for the person watching this, you see a, you know, I have the side of my office here is a glass wall, and it’s what time is it? It’s 337 in northern, I’m in central Ohio right now. So I’m way north to where you are. But we’ve got a low sun blowing in here.
And this is my aquarium wall. So the question is, what is the effect of the aquarium? So one of the effects is, is it’s like pouring food into the aquarium if you lived in this glasshouse and someone just poured food in all the time. You know what you’d be overfed and we tend to be overfed under new treated and overfed, we, it limits our movement, we don’t move as much as we should. Now, it was three degrees this morning up here when I was outside, doing contrast therapy.
But so I didn’t need cold water. I was just using cold air in and out of the hot tub. But, but our movement, you know, we’ve got to get moving and I didn’t I didn’t have to walk to kill something today to eat. I didn’t have to walk very far to walk to the refrigerator, right? I didn’t have to get outside and adjust, you know, living in an aquarium.
You know, it’s three degrees outside, but in my office, it’s a good solid 6568 degrees. My body is not having to adjust to the cold all day. I did it this morning with contrast therapy, and that’s a benefit but again, it’s the effect of the aquarium and this is the chat. This is why we all have to think about biohacking. What is it about our biology that we need to change to account for the effect of this mechanical environment we live in?
You know, control. I live in a house that’s a ranch house. I don’t have to step upstairs if I don’t want to. So I never activate my Ilio so us living in my house So if I don’t do that, and it spasms, then I’ll wind up with an I can’t say the name of the nerve that runs down the back of your leg. To say it, I won’t I won’t I won’t I wind up with sciatica, or else, I have to do exercises to stimulate that area to keep it from spasming.
So, you know, again, it’s the effect of the aquarium that we live in. That’s the reason we have to Biohack and you have to go back and check now, you said something about measuring autophagy we listen, we can only measure it in a research lab, right? Now we have to take cells out and we have to count things in the cells. It’s not like a red blood cell count or something like that we can do in a doctor’s office, but you know, you can start to estimate a toffee G, if you’re it listen if you’re in ketosis, you got to believe you’re probably heading into autophagy to the deeper and ketosis that you are, the deeper and autophagy you are. Now we don’t have a direct correlate there. But I think it is a pretty good proxy for you know, if you’re ketotic, then you’re probably in some level of autophagy.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, definitely, I was gonna say that. And that’s a good test to be able to do, I’m still kind of wrapping my head around that good, solid 68 degrees, I’d be like, freezing myself on that one. I gotta, I gotta turn it up a little bit higher than that. I’ve, I’m post-traumatic living in Canada, and Windchill factors. And now when I go back, people look at me like what’s wrong with you? And it’s like, I can’t do it. I just can’t. So we’re never near 68. Near here, Don.
Don Moxley: Well, what’s funny about that is and we’ve talked about I lived in Florida for a little over a year, not long ago, I was working down there. And I don’t My blood has not thinned out, I will take a northern winter over a southern summer, any day. So I tend to like the other one.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Well, you know, the thing is it to your point is we’re engineered to adapt to our environment. And we use one stimulus too often. And just like the lady that does the aerobics class every day, she’s not caught cross-trained to do the stair climber or go for a vacation going downhill skiing is like, well, I thought you worked out five days a week, well, your body got efficient at doing it. And now you’re not impacting hormetic stress to cause it to have to adapt.
And really, I think these are the biggest hormetic stressors that we could be doing is tapping into our pedigree, if you will, the way that our body has been engineered to live on a circadian rhythm and be in tune with the frequencies of the earth not and be able to go through feast and famines with the way we’ve been engineered so that we can get into the cleansing the cell feeding the debris removing and the support for healthy, healthy longevity.
So, you know, sort of switching gears on there. One of the things you talked about which we didn’t get a chance to talk about last time, which I’d be maybe a little rabbit hole to go down as you had some experience with the endocannabinoid system and talking about that, and you can’t talk about that without talking about a toffee G. I think that’s a fascinating connection that maybe some of the more sophisticated users or listeners to this conversation haven’t pieced together and understood the relationship or just in general with those that are the looking for new information about their health. And they heard about CBD or, and the cannabinoids and what’s the connection gone? I’m fascinated to know what Yeah, it’s.
Don Moxley: I wouldn’t call it a connection, I think it’s important. So when you look at when you’re looking at a toffee G, you’re looking at, you’re looking at a cellular internal cellular level performance. Cells come together to make tissues, tissues, and cells make organs. And then so when you step up a level to the organ system, you have your nervous system. That’s an entire system of integrated nervous cells with different processes that go with one. Now the important part is they both Listen, to the big rocks that we talked about, and let’s review that for a second.
When we start talking about health and performance, I talk about four big rocks that go into a jar. The four big rocks are a movement. The hack for that is exercise, and there are other hacks, I mean heat can be a hack cold can be a hack. So there are other ways to hack that. The second one is food. And you want to get food as pristine as possible with little processing as possible, as nutrient-dense as possible.
The Third Rock is lost Knowing when to get light when what kind of light to get, you know, again I’m up above the 45th parallel here we don’t go out into getting direct sunlight unless I’m getting it blasted through my window here I don’t get that on my whole body other than about three or four months a year when I can get out in a pair of shorts and not get arrested.
But you know so we hacked that with near-infrared lights and you know, I listened to lights huge for me, it’s become a big part of, of my wife and I’s lifestyle and then finally the fourth big rock is sleep. In the absence of sleep, it all goes away and light affects sleep, food affects sleep, exercise affects sleep, these things are all inner, inner, inner, inner rate inner connected, and then finally the bought the jar is purpose. What is your purpose? Why are you here?
What is it that wakes you up every morning? And for me, those four big rocks in that jar must get alignment with biohacking. A lot of times we get hung up on little things, we get hung up on what I call sand and gravel. And if you fill your jar with sand and gravel, you never have time to get to hold the big rocks in but if you get the big rocks in, you can pour sand and gravel around those big rocks and just fill the jar even more.
So when I start looking at this now, when we start looking at exercise, exercise has a direct effect on cellular autophagy that as we exercise more, we upregulate other sensing proteins called NPK and PKK MP kinase, which says hey, we need to get some energy going it down-regulates autophagy it up, break it down-regulates mTOR it up-regulates autophagy.
That’s a good thing. But at the same time when we exercise up at a system level, so let’s go up to the nervous system. We have what’s called the endocannabinoid system, it’s part of our nervous system that regulates how our nerves talk to each other. And the place they see this coming together is that you know when your body needs nutrients, what is the signal it gives you Joel.
Dr. Joel Rosen: that you’re hungry.
Don Moxley: that you’re hungry, it says, Hey, we need to get some nutrients. So it creates a the creates hunger when you’re when your system is dehydrated. What is this? What is the stimulus it gives you when you’re dehydrated?
Dr. Joel Rosen: And I got a gene Barian for that one and kidney issues, but I would imagine it’s thirst, right?
Don Moxley: Thirst, yeah, we’re looking for thirst. So when the body is signaling you with anxiety. Okay, when you are anxious, what is the body’s telling you to move? Okay, one of the great things about movement, does not only do we get the production of small proteins and small and small transmitters, one’s called BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It’s what cattle it’s what initiates learning, cellular, neurological learning so you could beat him, but we also get the production of what’s called anandamide and the end of mind is an endocannabinoid.
It’s a molecule that looks a lot like a cannabis molecule. But that goes into your nervous system, it lowers anxiety improves transmission across cell synapses, it lowers anxiety. So I think of anxiety, as a sign as an indicator that we need to move. Now a lot of times, we don’t move and we think, Oh, I’m anxious, I’ve got too much energy, I need to burn some energy, it has nothing to do with energy, it has everything to do with the need to get moving to produce at the end of mine, to get this to lower the anxiety to improve the neural communication.
That’s the real value that comes with that. So, you know, when we start talking about movement, movement affects both cellular level at an autophagy level and it improves at a neural level, let alone what it does in the cardiovascular system, what it’s doing in the liver, what it’s doing there. You know, it’s hitting a lot at a system level, not a cellular level as well. Is Is that what you’re thinking about?
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I mean, no, listen, it’s great. I’m not even thinking about but I just wanted elucidation on where’s the connectivity literally. And, you know, scientifically, I like the concept of not just movement, but I would talk about blood flow right and oxygenation. And then I would also take that one further in terms of ATP production, right, like if we are under stress, the most important variable of meeting that stress is having enough gas in the tank.
And the way we get gas in the tank when we’re metabolically flexible is by burning fat through oxygenation of it right, and that requires a lot of oxygen. You know, phosphorylation. And if you’re a glucose burner, you’re not going to do that. And so you need that blood flow. And interestingly enough, that’s what stimulates nitric oxide, which is a chemical messenger as well.
So chemical messengers, I hadn’t put it together. And I know there are some companies, I’ll talk to you after the interview that is looking at combining Aamp case stimulators with some of those endocannabinoids. And now it makes sense to me as to why so. But one of the interesting things you mentioned last time, and you just talked about it today, too.
And I wanted your insight on it was one of the things that impact your insulin levels, so much better than fasting is the infrared and, or the Juve. So tell me like, what you think the reason is for that because I’m under these lights all the time. And I’m always running a little high on my glucose, I got the continuous glucose monitor. And, you know, I just, it’s like the digital world that we live in. Whereas you can have photo modulation, to drive down your insulin and increase your autophagy. On the same coin, on the other side is the EMFs that you’re surrounded with all day that drives up your factor. So tell us a little bit about that. What you’ve learned with that, I’m, you know, yeah.
Don Moxley: yeah, that goes back to light, there’s and listen, there’s good food, there’s bad food, there’s good exercise, there’s, there’s good movement, there’s bad movement, you know, you can have the same thing with light. And, and one of the things that we have found, so when you start taking a look, one of the benefits of light, when I listen, where you live, I used to love go out and spend time on the beach, I mean, that’s the beauty of where you live.
And when you have your clothes off, and light is hitting the skin, you know, a lot of people just associate, you know, vitamin D development, I’m gonna go and get some vitamin D, well, there’s a lot more processes that take place with the different bands of light that come in at that time. One of those is what we know is that light stimulates mitochondrial performance.
Now, the things that you were just talking about when we’re burning sugar, we’re doing that in the cytosol, the middle of the cell, not in any of the organelles. But when we go into when we start burning fats, proteins, and sugars through the mitochondria using lots of oxygen that’s happening in the mitochondria, what we know is that there are bands of light, that stimulates mitochondrial health. And this is where some of these red light near-infrared light red light therapies come into play.
A lot of times when you see pain, the pain will be associated with a lack of mitochondrial performance. As you use these red lights, it will lower the pain response. And I think I probably talked about this that I’m, you know, I’m a type two diabetic, I’m a very insulin resistant kind of a person. I have to pay attention to it. I’m not like you know, a little you know, when these little burners I’m, you know, if the zombie apocalypse comes, I’m a very efficient fuel burner, okay, you guys are gonna have to be eating a lot. I’m just gonna be able to move through and keep my energy so I have that advantage after the apocalypse.
Dr. Joel Rosen: But when I’m talking with y’all stage, Italia, like you’ll go through like the crackhead, you know having to get used to it.
Don Moxley: But once I already fast I’m already fasting. I’m already preparing for it, right? But, when we take a look at that mitochondria is what drives those equations. And so I had surgery a year ago in September, and I and I got very ill, I got a Mersa infection from the surgery. And literally, I went from where I was riding my bike, three to five hours a week, to where I couldn’t get out of bed for nine weeks. And that that listen, you knock that much movement out of my life.
And it has my blood sugars taken off, you know, I was hospitalized for some time. They thought I mean, they’ve given me insulin. And this is the only time in my life I’ve ever taken insulin for what I do. And I was very ill there are no two ways about it. But when I got out, and I started to work, my movement levels back up and I started to control my sugars with movement and diet more. What I found was sitting in front of red light therapy, lowers my blood sugar as much as an insulin shot.
And this was and this was what was impressive for me. So this was one of the discoveries that we had coming through that. And again, you look at it, it’s not melting sugar out of your bloodstream. What is doing is it’s up-regulating your mitochondria, his ability to do that work, you know, so with a combination of some strength work because you know, you want to build that lean tissue you know, the more lean tissue you have, the more sugar can pull in as you upgrade the mitochondria.
I do a lot of what I call zone to work. You know my athletes when I’m training them I typically train them the majority and zone three of five zones. the system, we spend a lot of time building three, because you get the enzymatic benefits of cardiovascular fitness as well as the mitochondria. You know what I’m not, I’m not worried about wrestling, I’m not worried about fighting anymore. I’ll stick with just the mitochondrial development of exercise.
So I’ll stay in zone two, give myself some compassion, permit myself to train in zone two. So I do some strength work, I get a lot of zone to work in. But then I throw the red light therapy and on top of that, to go ahead and give these mitochondria all the chance they have to be as efficient and, and then with improved autophagy. You know, one of the benefits of one of the triggers for autophagy is a molecule that’s called spermidine. That’s the company that’s the product that we sell. And what we know is, is that as spermidine levels go up, autophagy levels go up.
Mitochondrial health improves, we see this in a lot of levels, we see an improvement in immune response, we see an improvement in cardiovascular, we see an improvement in neural performance, all those which are a benefit of autophagy. This is spermidine stimulated supportive. Autophagy. And that’s one of the benefits of doing what we do.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, no. I am excited to if you’re able to share some of the new developments that are going on with spur my dime and higher dosing and relationships to sleeping. But before we do that, just real quick, one of the things that I was excited to talk to you about when I saw you at the last Biohacking Conference, we talked about like one day seeing as the future of, of not having to wait 15 to 17 years and having the gyms that are customized.
So let me let’s kind of geek out together and say like, Hey, if we could design the the the, I guess the metrics and not just working out for exercise, say but for trainability and longevity, as you talked about with your first rock, what would the future health care slash Wellness Center? entail? What would it have to be able to empower people to not rely on necessarily prescriptive reactionary medications, but hey, here’s the way to, you know, especially with your our backgrounds, like physiology and exercise, you know, training and HRV. And we’re, what are the possibilities, Don? Because I was excited when we talked about that last time. Well, listen.
Don Moxley: I think I think the possibilities are dramatic. And you know, I sent I have a really good functional medicine doctor I work with, he’s a good friend of mine, really smart guy. And I sent him a note the other day and said, When are you going to take into consideration, my exercise data, my HRV data, my continuous glucose monitor data, instead of looking at a hemoglobin a one C measurement done every two, four times a year. He’s sent me I can’t tell you what he sent back. But you know, so much of medicine is built around. Here’s the test. Here’s the response.
Here’s the prescriptive process. And I don’t want to take anything away from that. But with technology, we can get better at this. You know, I had an I had a meeting earlier today with an old client of mine, and he’s become a good friend, this guy’s 82 years. And he is as fit as he is. It’s incredible. He went in to have cataract surgery done. And on the table, while they’re doing his heart rate dropped to 32 beats a minute. The anesthesiologist comes out and says like, listen, we can’t do this, you need to go get worked up. Because you know, they call that break of cardio, it’s a low heart rate.
This guy has I’ve seen this guy’s performance, he’s got a heart the size of an elephant. He does when he’s resting his heart does not need to beat more than 30 times a minute. Because that’s the level and then when you put him on an exercise routine, as it goes up the heart rate response, and this guy can go this guy can train at a heart rate of 140. He has an accessible heart rate training range of 110 beats a minute, that’s for an 82-year-old. That’s an incredible number. And he’s nervous about this. And I said, Listen, you know, when you’re resting, you’re not dizzy, you’re not passing out, you’ve got plenty of blood flow.
You don’t have anything to worry about, you know, go go to a doctor and get it checked out. But you got to go to a doctor that understands where you’re at, and he spends a lot of time working with his Apple Watch. So he got this Apple Watch. And this thing’s reminding him several times a day, particularly when he’s resting, his heart rate is dropped below 40 beats a minute. And the challenges with people like this is that when you go to the doctor, they do a diagnosis that’s typically statistically-based your response as compared to the populations high low in between whatever this guy is third standard deviation 99th percentile kind of a guy and and And you have to do the diagnosis differently.
This is where these functional medicine doctors come into play. And you know, people like you the way I’m dealing with you in real-time. And when you have access to real-time data, or at least stored real-time data, then you can make a lot of really good decisions and enjoy, I think about it if I want to go see a medical professional or a scientist, it’s that data that gives them that give me the ability to help thrive, rather than just survive, when you go to your regular health care system, your regular health care doctor once, twice, three times a year, and they do an RBC and they do the whole, their whole workup and you have your sugars and your hormones and your fats and so forth.
That is survival medicine. That is okay, we don’t see anything here that’s going to kill you anytime soon. But when you’re working with someone on looking at HRV, looking at exercise patterns, looking at continuous blood sugar measurement, you know, I saw something the other day, I think they’re going to have a wearable device that looks at ketones, which I’m excited about. You start to listen, when that when I think shows me glucose and ketones together, man, we’ve got a tool that we can use to tune thriving medicine into.
So I think that’s where the two things go. It’s about, you know, do you want to go into a practice, that that’s, that’s going to keep you alive, you know, that’s going to give you the risk of dying? Were you going to go into a practice, that’s going to give you the tools that you need to thrive, and frankly, that’s where I like to be.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I love it. you know, and it’s just as a harmless plug for we’re building a coaching program, where we integrate that data. So we can integrate their keto Mojo and their glucose ketone index, or a ring, a bio strap, a Garmin device, the Apple Watch, and then you’re able to put if you wanted to My Fitness Pal or chronometer, and you start to see this regression analysis of corollaries that are common sense stuff, like oh, my gosh, when I exercise, I, I have a better sleep or when I move more, it’s not rocket science, right? Why does that happen?
But sometimes there are some aha moments, especially when you’re tracking your glucose. And most people feel that they’re hypoglycemic, they’re gonna fall and hit their head and go into a coma. And their blood sugar is at 115. You know, like, just they don’t, they don’t understand that. So you have a comment that you wanted to say on that?
Don Moxley: Well, yeah. And I think you take it another step, Joel, and from the standpoint that how do I put this, I want to be in a position where, again, I’m going to repeat myself a minute ago that I want to thrive, I want to optimize, this is where the wearable technology comes into play. And frankly, it just isn’t touching traditional medicine right now. It’s they’re starting to flirt with it. It’s the functional medicine Docs that get it. And that’s where the real benefit comes from. And, you know, if that’s what you want to do, this is where you can go find that help.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, well, you know, just sort of bridging the gap of banging down the castle wall from the base, which we talked about last time. One of the things that can enlist the help of a supergiant is having an insurance company understand the actuary tables of, hey, if these numbers are favorable, and they correlate to less morbidity and mortality and more function and fewer claims for our insurance company, then we’re gonna reward you by giving back to you. So we say I mean, that’s a big ship in the ocean that has to turn very slowly.
But I mean, I, to me, it’s like okay, you’re saving mass millions of dollars on unnecessary when I say unnecessary, preventable things that could have been empowered by the person to take control of their health and understand these real-time lifestyle changes that will result in massive amount, especially with the tsunami of type two diabetes that’s on our you know, on our front, why would an insurance company you’re not want to reward someone for the money that they’re saved and incentivize them to be healthy? And it doesn’t make sense to do it does.
Don Moxley: worse we’re starting to see that but don’t forget those castle walls are big and thick. Yeah, and sure, health care, these institutions that we’re talking about, you know, that they’re there, they’re big, that they’re there’s a lot of, again, it’s the ship on the ocean, there’s a lot of momentum, it’s working for them the way it’s working, you know, I don’t necessarily remember this about bocce.
But if you drive around Columbus, Ohio, the majority of the big construction taking places in our health care centers, you go over to Ohio State and Riverside and these big facilities, they’re building, they’re building institutions of illness, the to treat illness, and unfortunately, that’s where the money’s at. That’s where the population is at. And that’s where the money’s at. So you can’t, you can’t wait for that. To fix itself. You have to own this yourself.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, for sure. And, and, you know, it’s, it’s been a big, big profitable, like, bust, like boom years for the last two years in those industries. And, you know, for a reason, um, there was something that I was gonna say in that in a second, but I kind of forgot, but as far as like, what’s new with spermidine, in terms of some exciting developments, research that you guys are doing?
Don Moxley: Yeah, there’s there we have we have some really good research that has been published relatively recently, one of the really good articles I since we talked about was the COVID article. So you know, what we know is that when you take a look at the COVID virus, there’s no doubt that when it infects a cell, one of the first things it interferes with is the autophagy pathways. What the research has shown us is that the COVID virus overstimulates, the beginning of the toffee G process where it’s creating, and the way the beginning of the autophagy process works normally is there’s something in the cell, there’s a protein, there’s an organelle, there’s a virus, there’s a bacteria, and the cell then creates this double-wall vacuole that surrounds it, it’s called autophagy.
Home, and then that autophagy on bonds to what’s called a lysosome, which is all the the the enzymes that digest the stuff in there. Well, COVID overstimulates, that autophagy on production, so it gives the place for the virus to replicate, then it interferes with the, with the lysosome, or connection to that. So it just builds up in the cell. And what the research shows is that if so we know that there are at least 59 different proteins involved in the autophagy process.
We know different things can stimulate besides an immune response stimulating a toffee G while fasting can exercise can he can there’s a lot of ways to do this. So one of the benefits that we see is that as you upregulate autophagy VF supermini supplementation, it lowers the ability of that COVID virus to reproduce in the cell, we have a really interesting study that came out in Berlin, that showed that the human immune cells supplemented with spermidine, stop COVID transmission 8590 92% of the time.
So and when you start to take a look at people who, who did not do well, with COVID, versus those who had no impact, you start to look at comorbidities, you know, this thing they’ve talked about the whole time, diabetics, inflammation, inflamed, high blood pressure, these are the folks that suffered. Well, these are the people that had poor autophagy from just a normal lifestyle process. So this was a really interesting study.
You know, one of the other things that we see emerging this kind of interest, you know, we tend to geek out on morbidity and mortality, but the rest of the world wants just to look good, right. And when you start taking a look at beauty doesn’t start, the beauty is more than skin deep, I would like to say, and it starts with that cellular health in those in those cells that make your skin make your nails, this is what we call the epithelial cells. And what we know is with spermidine supplementation, there’s an upregulation of stem cell production in the epithelial cells.
So those cells that you want that make you beautiful, then there’s more of them when you’re supplementing, and your autophagy levels are high. And that’s and then and then finally, the last big study that we saw was really interesting with spermidine supplementation, we saw the lack of decline in dementia, meaning that we had two groups with dementia with some level of dementia. One group got a placebo, one feminized group, the sperm, the group that got the placebo got worse, the group that got sperm at nine stayed the same, they didn’t get worse. So you start to see that performance.
Listen, I think we have to solve this dementia, Alzheimer’s, neuro, neuro let you know, it’s just it’s so difficult when someone winds up in that. And if you’re going too fast, stop fasting to lose weight, just stop don’t do it anymore. Start fasting to improve immune response fast to improve cardiovascular response fast to improve neural response fast to be more beautiful because you have an upregulation of epithelial stem cells and Damn it, you’re going to look better. Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Joel Rosen: But you know, the thing Though on the fasting thing, especially as being insulin resistant, it’s not gonna you need to work with someone that understands the transition, I mean, I get the idea of going to a 12-hour window. But when your body doesn’t recognize the ability to tap into your stored fat, even though I say it’s like a tanker, it’s like a gas tanker at the side of the road that ran out of gas and its tank, and it has 1000s of gallons of gas to be able to tap into.
And it doesn’t know how to do that. And you could lower the transition period by healthy support for your floor, hydrogen sulfide, and lots of other ways to help that process. So don’t just sort of put, you know, by running shoes and say, I’m going to run the marathon tomorrow. It takes a little bit of sophistication. But I agree with you. And you know, the irony is, is that you watch those commercials of you know, this drug or that drug.
And along with a healthy diet and regular exercise, this drug will help you. And I always find as they should just say along with the diet and healthy exercise, you don’t need the drug and you’ll do well. But what’s great about Sperma Dinah’s, along with a healthy diet and exercise, this actually will make the difference, right?
Don Moxley: Yeah. There’s and we know that what we know is that you get spermidine and spermine, and works in your cells from three different places. Number one is that it will be created in the gut and transported into the body. Number two, you get it dietarily. But number three is it will be generated what’s called de novo in the cell on demand. What we know is that de novo production declines with age.
So you’ve got to replace it with dietary. And we know that when you do we place it dietarily The level stays high. And that’s one of the big benefits. And again, I for your audience. You know, listen, I’ve worked in the fitness business since 1986. When I got out of grad school, I started running my first health club, and we’ve been working on it. And we’ve always referred to dieting as fewer calories trying to drive the calories down. And frankly, it’s not worked.
And what I want people to start thinking about is that when you start thinking your calories, I want you to condense them, I don’t want you to compress them, I want you to condense them, and then pay attention, that condensing of the calories is where the health benefits. It’s not here, it’s here. And I think this is important to pay attention to, at the same time get the necessary molecules we have, we have a lot of good science showing us that this is a particular nutrient that’s necessary. You know, we’re applying for what’s called medical food claim status.
And what it says is that you can’t get enough sperm or dine on a regular diet to prevent the onset of some of these inflammatory diseases. So you can go out, we’re trying to coordinate a research study, I want a researcher somewhere. And if someone is listening to this working into a lab that can measure Pollyanna means I want you to go to Whole Foods, I want you to pick up mushrooms, I want you to pick up some broccoli, I want you to pick up the high spermidine foods and it’s in the papers.
And I want you to go into your lab and I want you to measure how much sperm anions in them. Because the indications that we’re getting is it’s very low and in the agriculture environment that we live in. We raise food for production or we’re looking at carbohydrates, fats, proteins, things like that. We’re not necessarily looking at the micronutrients and spermine is one of those nutrients that’s gone by the wayside that we just got to get supplemented when you do it makes it better.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I mean, the atrocity of like going back to the 30s and having depletion of the soils you know, it’s, it’s crazy. So So you know, I’ve changed the name of the podcast show to the truth about your health. And I like to be somewhat, I will say controversial, but attack certain concepts that are taken sacredly and maybe topple them over and redefine what health is and give it away.
Don Moxley: at the castle a little bit. Yeah, right.
Dr. Joel Rosen: I’m gonna dock it down. I will. So I’m like Andy and Shawshank Redemption. Right? So as far as Um, let me ask you this, though. The new question that I have is, you know, the truth what truth about health that you didn’t always know that was would you say the maybe sticks out in your mind? Given you have like, I’m always interested to hear your answer.
You have the rocks and you have the purpose and you have exercise not so much for vanity, but for functionality. But what would you say in terms of all of those things, anything else that’s unique in terms of truth about health that you’ve kind of had aha moments where it kind of was a sacred cow for you being tipped over and being rethought of?
Don Moxley: Well, you know, I go back to and I think about when I was working in a sports medicine practice back in the day the late 80s, early 90s, and we had a surgeon in that practice that came in with this crazy idea that you could eat fat and protein, you didn’t need carbohydrates. And, and I thought to myself, you’ve lost your mind. Because that way, I just finished up a master’s degree.
And what I was told is that carbohydrates are pristine. I mean, these are critical. And when you start to take a look at the Adkins process, you know what he was right. And, you know, his name was Dr. Ray Tegner. And I don’t think I’ve ever told him this, but, you know, I thought he was crazy back then. But when we start to take a look at this, you know, what you can get through life without refined carbohydrates.
And in fact, your performances are going to improve and, and when we start to take a look at this with relation to a healthy lifestyle, you know, I walk into CVS to pick up scripts and so forth, and you walk past aisles and aisles and aisles of process glucose. Okay, why? Number one, we like it to taste good. Number two, it’s cheap, it has a great shelf life. It’s a great business model.
It is a horrible health model. And this is the challenge and we can’t expect big businesses to do what’s in our best interest. We can’t expect the insurance companies and health care to necessarily do what’s in our best interest, we have to own that. And I think this is the process is that you know, when I go into my doctor, I go in with questions and I challenge them.
Tell me about this. Why does this work this way? And you know, it’s gotten to the point where I’ve got to take his last appointment of the day or a staff is pissed at me, because I’m, I’m going in Joe, I, my daughter moved out of our house on January 2. It’s now January 26. We’ve been my wife and I moved into the third phase of our life a little over three weeks ago, we’ve got almost four weeks in the third phase of our life.
I want this to be a long phase for me, I’m I I’ve made the statement I’ve had the chance to coach some amazing athletes I’ve I’ve coached Olympic medalist, Olympic gold medalist, silver and bronze, multiple sports, I’ve worked with all Americans, I’ve worked with some phenomenal humans. Without a doubt, the best coaching experience I ever had was coaching my daughter’s eighth-grade field hockey team. It was wonderful. I took the second team, we worked together, we made huge progress.
Joel, I’m looking forward to coaching my grandchildren. That’s what I’m looking forward to. And I want to be that crazy grandfather, that is like holy, you know, they’re Holy shit, who is this guy, I want to be that person. I don’t you know, as, like a long-term type two diabetic, I have to pay attention to a lot of stuff, I have to be careful about the impact of glucose in my system. Because I’m now moving into the phase of my life when it goes bad, it goes really bad.
And I just can’t afford to do that. So I have to own it. This is the thing that has impressed me. And you know what, you and I may have very similar practices, but there may be various, you may be vegan, I may be a carnivore, neither of those is wrong. But we need to get all of our food from fresh sources. This is important. It’s fair to believe that with the genetic diversity that we have, I can have a carnivore and I can have a vegan and they can both be healthy because of the genetic diversity.
That’s okay. You got to figure out what works for you. And using monitoring whether it be HRV or blood sugar are these things that are coming along with the physician becoming an advisor? Not a director, you are the director of what you do. Let these people be advisors to you but you’ve got to own your process.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah knows all great answers for sure. I’m just trying to tie back So had you with that truth about how if I guess it took you a while to realize he was right or do you wish you would have learned it earlier with everything you just said you.
Don Moxley: Know what I the thing that brought it around to me was reading good calories by bad calories by Lustick author Gary tab’s great book. If you want to understand where things went sideways, Gary’s done a good job of looking at that. And I looked at that and I started thinking, Ah, this information that they were given us back in the early and mid-80s.
This was based on a lot of that Ancel Keys and the stuff coming out of the government and it was being my and being driven by big food by big and when I say big food, big food is companies that sell processed carbohydrates. And you know what? Listen, I Gatorade. There’s not a single research study out there showing Gatorade improves athletic performance over water.
You know what, but they do a hell of a job marketing. But at the end of the day, it’s a carbohydrate marketing company. And this is the thing is that when you walk into that store, you know, you go driving and you walk in and here are rows of, of, of Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola and Gatorade, all carbohydrate delivery systems and when we start to take a look at this is a problem.
Dr. Joel Rosen: yeah, I guess the extrapolation is the truth about health is and I learned it too with my exercise physiology background is the carbohydrate model it, not all carbs are created equal number one, but also like who’s sponsoring the curriculum you know, kind of thing so anyway, I’m always interesting talking to you love the vibe that you have and wish you the best in your third phase your longest of all three and enjoyment and fulfillment and nothing but good health for you.
Will last time we talked you gave me a discount link so that I can put that link in our show notes. Yeah, so for people to get and yeah, I’ll be interested I’ll be speaking in, in March in in in Vegas as well. So we’ll see you and your Dr. Martens and I look forward to touching base with you again.
Don Moxley: I picked up two more pairs in the last six months. I’m good. That’s what 18 now or what I’m 17 of 17 pairs of Doc Martens. That’s kind of my thing.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, listen, we’ll catch you up with you again and nothing but best for you and your family.
Don Moxley: Thanks, Joe. We appreciate the time and the opportunity. You’re welcome. Talk to you later.
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