Robert Lufkin  00:01

Welcome back to the health longevity secrets show and I'm your host, Dr. Robert Lufkin. Today I'm delighted to welcome back Dr. Steven Sideroff from UCLA, who will be talking about the longevity online program that we're planning for spring 2023 And some of those who will be participating. Today we'll be touching on the work by Liz Parrish, Tina woods, Tim Peterson, Rakesh Suri and others. Dr. Sideroff is an internationally recognized expert in resilience, optimal performance, addiction Neurofeedback and alternative approaches to stress and mental health. He is associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, with a joint appointment in the department of Rheumatology at UCLA School of Medicine. He is also director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics. And now, please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Steven siter off. Hey, Steve, welcome to the show.

Stephen Sideroff  01:02

Thank you, Rob. It's such a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to work together on such an important and amazing and, and a topic that's just exploding in terms of research and findings. So thank you. Yes, this is great.

Robert Lufkin  01:21

Yeah, longevity is just, it's taken off. There's been more in the last five years and I think in the last 50 years of breakthroughs and all that's why it's going to be so fascinating and and fun to interview all these world experts and Steve and I are going to be the CO hosts of a longevity summit that will be available for free online, where we interview the literally they a list of top experts in longevity from around the world. I think so far we've we have commitments from Peter Diamandis and Mark Hyman ret NIR Barzilai, Matt Caber, line. Misha blog, Moscone, just an amazing list of people, even Joe Merck Mercola, from a variety of of lists and and you have a few to Steve that are that are that you're excited about as well, I think,

Stephen Sideroff  02:23

Well, to begin with, I'm excited about integrating body and mind into this longevity Summit. Because they are so much so intertwined, mind and body, emotional health, physical health. And I'm glad that we will have the opportunity to put a focus on the interplay between physical, emotional, and mental. And I'm, I'm excited that we have a wonderful growing list of people in this integrated field, including Peter Levine, who we will be interviewing Steven Porges, who we will be interviewing Joe Dispenza, we will be interviewing, so I am happy that we are not going to be in the separate silos as to what current language is four separate areas in that we're getting to integrate body and mind. Yeah,

Robert Lufkin  03:26

yeah. And I think this this body mind approach to longevity, I really haven't seen that anywhere. I mean, we, there's there's certainly a lot of activity about people who want to develop a pill for longevity, or, you know, gene therapy for longevity. But in a broader sense, we're understanding that things like lifestyle, may may play a more powerful role on our longevity than anything else. And then when you include lifestyle, the main motivator for that, that is the stress that we create in our lives and the resilience that we produce, which you're an expert on, and the speakers are going to be speaking about. It just opens so many possibilities. So I'm so excited about that.

Stephen Sideroff  04:12

Yeah. Great. Great. So, Rob, you want to just begin just talking about a couple of the people that are coming up? Yeah, yeah, we're,

Robert Lufkin  04:24

as Steve and I go through and bring the people on the program, we're going to be speaking with him in depth about their areas of expertise and what they've understood about longevity and the things that that we can do on our own lives to improve our own our own longevity. And we're going to be hearing from from all of them in the spring in this session. But before that, I thought today we might we might just talk about a few of them that Steven and I are going to be speaking with, first of all, just kind of in a sore CorpNet have different topics on longevity. And the first the first person I'll mention is Liz Parrish. Elizabeth Parrish is CEO of a company called Bio viva. And it's a, they have a number of products, but their most remarkable thing. And the thing that they're focusing on that that's pertinent to us is the idea of gene transplants or gene therapy to increase longevity. And they, they actually, they work both in animal models, and they actually have data from human trials that are being done by another company that they work with, which operates outside of the United States. So this is a, an interesting situation. It's outside the FDA, it doesn't require all those approvals, but it allows them to get some some human data. And we can we can dive into that when we talk to Liz on the program. But they've just published a paper that, that where they talk about their human use, and their their mice use. And we'll, we'll have this in the show notes. But it's a, it's a fascinating paper that Liz is a co author on also George Church, from Harvard Medical School, is a co author on it, records, medical school, Howard University College of Medicine, as well. So it's it's a multi authored collaborative project from several leading medical schools in this country. And it's, they talk about what what their work is, but, and so when listed on the program, we'll get into a lot of detail with it. But basically, what they do is they, their idea is to add more copies of favourable genes to our bodies, and like, they're in the animal kingdom, for example, elephants, famously never get cancer. And nobody knows why until they look, there's a specific gene called P 53, that humans have one copy of that elephants happen to have many, many copies of so the idea of gene therapy that Luiza this company is pursuing is to add extra copies of genes. And those specific genes that increase longevity, and that's that's what they're beginning to explore with their animal studies in mice, but but also they're doing it in humans, which is, which is just mind blowing to think about it.

Stephen Sideroff  07:42

Yeah. These new this new research in this area is so fascinating. But one of the things that I want to bring into our conversation, which has more to do with what people can do themselves in terms of lifestyle, in terms of really learning to learn self regulation, rather than something external, like a pill, like a gene therapy in which you're trying to correct something from an external source, a lot of the people talking from the psychological perspective, looking at Trump, whether whether it's looking at trauma, like Peter Levine, looking at the nervous system, like Steven Porges, what we're going to also be bringing in is how people can recognize how over the years over their life's process of development, we've lost the ability to self regulate, and that's one of the reasons we go to a doctor to get a pill is for it to compensate for the loss of self regulation. And one of the things that I emphasize in my own work, is how early childhood lessons of early childhood get basically imprinted in our brain and in our bodies, so that we adapt to our childhood environment. And then our ability to adapt gets sort of frozen there. And what needs to happen is a new effort at re regulating our nervous system, our behavior, from the lessons of childhood and this is very possible because of the brain's capacity for neuroplasticity. So these are some areas that we will want to touch into in terms of self regulation. When you have trauma in your childhood, it throws off your nervous system stress and your childhood frozen If your nervous system so that it doesn't function at its best, and we will introduce ways of helping our bodies, our brains, our nervous system function at at their best, what I refer to as resilience, and this is another aspect of how we can age more gracefully, more healthily, and live longer.

Robert Lufkin  10:26

Yeah, yeah. And that's a good point, I mean, Liz perishes approach to gene therapy is sort of the one extreme versus versus the other extreme and, and we'll get into the details when she's on the program about specifically what she's doing here to Gene she's looking at transplanting or that they are transferring into humans. One is H turret, which is telomerase, it affects our telomeres, which we'll be hearing about, and the other is full of statin and it, it allows our muscles to grow. And with both of these genes, they've shown that they can increase longevity in mice significantly, and, and some biomarkers of aging in the humans that have had it done, but it's clearly very, very early stages. And we have a lot more to learn in this area.

Stephen Sideroff  11:19

Yeah. Well, like you, I'm so excited to speak with each one of our amazing speakers and, and share their in, both share their information with our audience, but also challenge them and our conversations with them. And let's see what what we come up with.

Robert Lufkin  11:40

Absolutely, yeah, the the second speaker we have is from completely looking at longevity from a completely different perspective and bringing different tools on it. And that's, that's Tina woods, who's asked the question, how can artificial intelligence drive longevity gains Tina is a social entrepreneur who's helped set a audacious goal of increasing the average lifespan of five years for an entire country by 2035. She is co founder and CEO of longevity international organization, she has a degree in genetics from Cornell, but also an MBA in business from London. She is also the Secretariat, director of the all party parliamentary group for longevity in the United Kingdom. So it'll be fascinating to look at the policy side of longevity and how that how that works.

Stephen Sideroff  12:49

I think this is such an important topic. I know that, for the first time in modern history, the average age has actually declined over the last couple of years. Now, of course, we've had COVID, that plays a role in that. But also the rate of development of chronic illness in Western society has been going up as well. And, you know, we both are very much aware of the relationship between aging and disease formation, aging being one of the key variables toward that. So this is all bringing together all of this, these pieces are colliding. All together, we now have research that shows that stress actually shortens the telomeres that are the caps protecting our DNA. So we actually have hard evidence that stress actually speeds up the aging process.

Robert Lufkin  14:01

Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, we take we can talk about, you know, the families Perish the genes or the resilience that Steve's mentioning or pills or any of these other things, but from this policy standpoint as a national initiative, what Tina looks at she she makes it an interesting observation. So our presentations that one of the greatest risk factors for for long are greatest factor in longevity determination or risk factors for aging is the zip code that you have to live in. Which, you know, is of course true and there and that brings back you know, socio economic factors that we can't ignore when we you know, when we consider lifestyle and look at longevity, so I'm really excited to see her A presentation and here hear what she's going to be talking about as well.

Stephen Sideroff  15:05

Yeah, I I'm glad that we are having her participating. Because I think that is such an important issue I, I just came back from I was honored to speak at the Concordia 2022 summit in, in New York this past week.

Robert Lufkin  15:24

People, sorry to tell people about Concordia, if they haven't heard of it, what what it is and who some of the speakers are.

Stephen Sideroff  15:31

So this is an amazing organization that brings together the private sector, the public sector, sector, and the nonprofit sector to work on global issues. And there, there were, there was a lot of discussion about driving greater equity, and bringing the advances that Western civilization add to the rest of the world. And and you know, you mentioned zip code, while this was was really about how do we how do we take all of the advances that we're talking about, and make them available to everybody in the world, not just the privileged few. So this is also a very important topic and any way that our information can support that would be great.

Robert Lufkin  16:28

Yeah, who were who were some of the some of the speakers you heard there? Or did anything touch on longevity at that conference that might, might be of interest to our audience here.

Stephen Sideroff  16:40

There weren't there wasn't well, okay. So yeah, the the mayor of New York spoke, Tony Blair was another one of the speakers. And the last, the closing remarks were made by Dr. Joe Biden. So it was a global audience, a lot of representation from Latin America and from Africa. And the, the only place that longevity was touched into longevity was in the people making efforts to expand drinking water to the places where they don't have drinking water, electricity to the places where they don't have electricity. And these changes drive better health, education to these areas. Also, all of these things drive better health, whether it's education, clean water, electricity, allows children to study at night. Clean water allows children to spend more time studying, instead of spending hours literally walking to get fresh water and bring it back to their home. So it shows in unintended ways how some of these basic facts of life that we take for granted actually improve health on many different levels. So it was a great conference and bringing people together who are working toward this greater sense of equity and, and bringing these electricity, water etc, to an education to everybody.

Robert Lufkin  18:31

Yeah, that's so fundamental for for disease in or improving disease, of course, improves longevity and aging. And we're all it's all really the same thing. Just seen from a different perspective.

Stephen Sideroff  18:46

Yeah, and that's one of the that's one of the basic messages of this. This conference was the interconnectedness of all the issues, climate change, pollution, things of the all of these things, waste management. They are all interrelated problems. And we now have, because we have so many people on our planet, you can't escape how what one person does impacts and affects somebody else.

Robert Lufkin  19:19

Yeah, yeah. That's such an important message. Or one other person we're going to be hearing from is Tim Peterson, who is a professor at Washington University. And unlike Liz Parrish, or Tina woods 10 is approaching longevity from a completely different direction. Tim is an expert in the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain for the development of decentralized organizations that sort of the the ultimate democracy is decentralization, where everyone controls and vote It's through these dowels and Tim is as is working with others on Vita Dow Vida Dow is a, it's a collective for community governed and decentralized drug development specifically for longevity. And they're their core mission is to accelerate r&d in the longevity space and an extension of human life and lifespan. And the way they approach is is is they sell it's it's a cryptocurrency based, decentralized organization. And they, they funded digitize research in the form of cryptocurrency documents, which are called NF T's or non fungible tokens. It's a lot of detail, I'm sure Tim will explain it much better. But the idea is that it's a more democratic way for drugs to be developed. And then the patients can be stakeholders in the drug development, the investors can be stakeholders, and then it still protects the drug companies rights because the patents will be then sold from Vida Tao. But then we'll reward the patients and everything that comes with it. So and they've got some interesting projects already that they're going they're funding a rapamycin study and several other studies, anyone can join Vida Tao. Anyone can participate in the governance of vitae, Dow, and anyone can get research funds, it's just a matter of requesting through this decentralized organization. But it'll it'll be fascinating because this, this may be the future of drug development, not only for longevity, but for all areas. But this is there at the forefront of this space. And it happens to be in longevity. So be fascinating to see what they what they come up with when we talk with Tim and detail.

Stephen Sideroff  22:04

Beautiful, Rob, I'm so pleased that we have such a wide range of experts in the field of longevity, approaching it from so many different directions.

Robert Lufkin  22:17

Yeah, yeah. And I'll just I'll just mention one other one, maybe today, sort of round out, round out the the list that we'll talk about in this session. And that's an individual that comes to longevity from sort of the the travel medicine space, or the concierge medicine space. His name is Rakesh Suri, and he is with a new company called fountain health, which is essentially a concierge medical service service built around specifically longevity, and Rakesh has a great history at the Cleveland Clinic and head of the Abu Dhabi cardiology program. They're the largest hospital of its type in the world. So he knows how to do things in this space. But it'll be fascinating to hear from him. The approaches they take for the participants in this in this new venture. In other words, what sort of testing do they use for biological age? What sort of interventions do they provide? What are you know, what are their markers for longevity? what's the, what's the goalposts? That's always a challenge with unlike, you know, unlike heart disease or blood pressure, where you can, you can actually measure outcomes that will change with therapy for human longevity, you know, the outcome is death, and we don't want that to be the goalposts necessarily, and it's something that we all we all face is or the challenge we all have is coming up with biomarkers for longevity and biomarkers for aging that that we can use to see whether any of these interventions are working, you know, if you take Metformin does that help or not? If you take rapamycin, does that help or not? You take another nutraceutical, NAD supplements or, or whatever these things cost money. One they're expensive, but they also, you know, any drug has side effects or, or even lifestyle choices. You know, we may choose a certain lifestyle, thinking it will make us live longer, but it may be a lifestyle that we wouldn't choose to do if if we didn't know we'd live longer and if if there's no no measurable effect, you know, it's hard to say.

Stephen Sideroff  24:50

Yeah, I want to emphasize what you're talking about with biomarkers in my field of psychology. The one thing that's so important is being able to measure whatever it is you're researching. It's through measurement that you discover what works, what doesn't work, you, you, when you get that kind of feedback, you begin to hone in on best practices. So, with all these biomarkers and ways of actually measuring the aging process, we have a better handle on identifying what works, and what in what doesn't work. So that's from a psychological perspective, this is so invaluable.

Robert Lufkin  25:45

Yeah, it's such a good point, Steve, it's, it's like, it also helps me to stay on my path. So to speak, these, Steve's first book is called the path about resilience, but it's about staying on commitment to change in your lifestyle. And the same thing applies to longevity here, but my point was, it helps me to stay on the path if I have some sort of metric that I can measure, whether it's a blood test, or the way I feel or something like that. And it may turn out there may be, you know, ultimately, there may it may be difficult to come up with biomarkers for longevity, you know, we have DNA methylation clocks, and this sort of thing that are that are out there. And we're going to have some experts talk about that Morgan Levine is going to be on the program. But it may be that the best markers biomarkers for longevity, will be the biomarkers for the chronic diseases that cause the longevity that determine the longevity. So, you know, there's only six or so diseases that that create 90% of the deaths and ultimately determine longevity, and 90% of the people. So the biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, the biomarkers for diabetes, the biomarkers for heart disease, cancer, stroke, you hit those, and you've you really determined longevity for those people. I mean, they, you know, they could take all the, the, you know, the NAD supplements or the rapamycin or whatever, but if they get cancer, that's metastatic, then it's game over, you know, depending on the type of cancer so or have a have a devastating heart attack. So it may be and maybe it may be the ultimate longevity metric. And I know that's one thing we're going to be focusing on Steven, our program, the ultimate longevity metric may come from an aggregate, a combination of, of markers for heart disease, diabetes, a marker for resilience, a marker for mental health, a meta markers for Alzheimer's disease, putting these all together, will then will then come up with a aggregate biological age aggregate longevity clock, it will be better than any single DNA methylation epigenetic clock.

Stephen Sideroff  28:10

Yeah. So let me let me introduce one other concept here that we're going to be touching on. And some of the people that we will be interviewing have a real interest and focus on looking at the evolutionary processes, and the influence of evolutionary processes on longevity and what we're talking about. So for example, we still have the same survival stress mechanism, that of our hunter gatherer ancestors, which is the basically a combination of freeze, and fight or flight. And so are our bodies to any danger to any threat, real or imagined. Our bodies mobilize by preparing us to either fight the danger or run or if we don't see an escape, to actually have what's referred to as a freeze response. None of these are really adaptive to our present lifestyle. And so here we have a an inborn mechanism that's developed over you know, hundreds of 1000s of years but we still have the same mechanisms. Even though our environment our society, as civilization has gone way past hunter gatherer where, you know, very few if any of our responses to dangerous stress can be solved by either fighting the danger or running from it. So now how do you deal with this discrepancy between how are we are ordered Maddox really set up to respond to stress and danger with what really would be most effective. So there's another psychological imbalance there between those two. And how do we address that? How do we adapt to that, and we have some ideas that we'll be talking about in many of our interviews on how to address this evolutionary mismatch, as I referred to it.

Robert Lufkin  30:30

So funny, it's so interesting that you bring that up, Steve, the evolutionary mismatch, the idea that 100 That that traits in hunter gatherers would be maladaptive in our current society. And that's, that's certainly true. Another example of that is in the lifestyle nutrition sense when we for millions of years evolved to eat basically fat and protein with relatively few carbohydrates, just as they weren't available that much in the diet. And then 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture, and which spread around the world, which Jared Diamond says famously says the worst mistake in human history. But But agriculture. No matter how you feel about it produced freely available grains, and carbohydrate, refined foods, the food could be stored. So rather than eating periodically, and fasting for days, like a hunter gatherer would on eating protein, and fat. Instead, the biological systems that were determined to handle the hunter gatherer system, mTOR signaling, which we'll talk about a lot later, when we were confronted with all these grains and carbohydrates, and later on refined carbohydrates, the body's normal response is to store them for, for fat and raise the blood sugar. And what we're seeing now, that's been accelerated in the 20th century and 21st century with sort of misguided governmental diet dietary programs such like the low fat diet, it's driven this consumption, this maladaptive, these, these maladaptive patterns, people are being exposed to food that they never saw in this hunter gatherer situation. And now we have the worst diabetes epidemic in history, the worst obesity epidemic in history, basically, all the chronic diseases that drive longevity, are being accelerated through these things. And it's not like the genes change. It's not like, a lot more people have diabetes, because of the genetic background. It's absolutely what they're putting into their bodies. It's absolutely dietary, and no question about it.

Stephen Sideroff  33:01

So I'm so excited for us to get into all of these interviews, just as, as you and I are talking here today about all of the important new lessons, all of the important ways that we're really from a research based perspective, because all of what we're talking about has the research behind it. And what I'm excited about is for you and I to help people discern the real data from the fake data, the the factors that are really important in each of our lives, versus what a lot of people may be promoting that are not accurate, not scientifically based. And so you and I have years and years of, of experience, being able to make these discriminations, as you know, reviewers of scientific papers ourselves and producers of them, we can separate out what's real from what's not real, and contribute to an understanding of where the direction we're going in. So from the biological perspective, from the psychological perspective, from the lifestyle perspective, we have an opportunity to kind of bring all of these different fields together and and help turn determine how they fit with each other. So this is going to be a really great I'm excited because I'm going to learn a lot just as much as the our audience is going to learn a lot in this process. Yeah,

Robert Lufkin  34:43

I am too I can't wait to hear this is going to be the really the cutting edge the latest information but it's going to be aimed at everyday people as as seen through filtered through Steve and my eyes and we're going to look at it from our Experience critically as as scientists as medical healthcare people, but we're when we're hopefully going to filter out the the things that are not true or that don't have evidence for them versus the things that do have evidence. And that's no more important now than ever before, in with the internet and all in all the claims that we're exposed to, and and sometimes outright lies that we see in in articles.

Stephen Sideroff  35:30

Yeah, yeah. But there's so much promise around, I'll talk from my perspective of neuroplasticity. There's so much promise in terms of how the brain has tremendous healing capabilities. So even if you approach this from a place of chronic illness of, of trauma, biologically impaired genetic makeup, however, there is tremendous promise. I'll just, Rob, I'll just highlight a research study that I just had, that I just published where we worked with a group of breast cancer survivors. These were women who went through chemotherapy and had what's referred to as chemo brain, which are cognitive deficits due to both the combination of the cancer and the chemotherapy that they had. And in our research, we, we validated the tremendous impairment in the electroencephalogram of these patients, severely impaired brainwave patterns with excessive slow wave activity. And through a process referred to as neurofeedback, monitoring their brainwaves feeding that information back to them, they actually were able to heal their brains and recover much of their lives, we almost completely normalized their brainwave function using this Neurofeedback intervention. So it supports the notion of our ability to recover from all kinds of impairments. And that's so exciting. We'll be getting into more of that over our sessions.

Robert Lufkin  37:30

Yeah, that that's, that's been an incredible aha moment for me too, as I as I've drilled deeper into this space, that, that there is credible evidence and scientific evidence based medicine that shows not only slowing of aging, but in some cases, reversal of phenotypes of aging, which can either show up as simple things like the appearance of the skin, or hearing loss with aging, but they can also show up with chronic diseases, even even Alzheimer's in some situations can be reversed depending on the underlying cause of it. But you know, a lot more work has to be done in all these areas, but as you say, just the possibility that the brain is malleable, and that our, our biological constitutions are malleable, and it's not just a matter of slowing them down, but we can actually improve many of these diseases and improve our longevity.

Stephen Sideroff  38:34

Yeah. Well, you know, Rob, you and I are as much as we are, you know, scientists and and professionals here. We are also consumers of all the information we're taking a look at, right?

Robert Lufkin 38:48

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Stephen Sideroff  38:52

You and I, you and I are trying to decide for ourselves, which of these findings should we follow? And so we are guinea pigs in this process, as well as everybody else because nothing is fixed and finalized. And we're exploring what we believe are the most likely processes to engage in and we're going to invite our audience to be in involved in this process along with us.

Robert Lufkin  39:26

Yeah. And as you'll, as you'll see, in the program, Steve and I are not hesitant to jump in feet first headfirst into the pool and really test these tests some of these applications so it's going to be a great journey to to find out how that works. Well, let's see. We were just, we're just about out of time here and, and I think, in November, we're going to we have a few more guests. We're going to be We're talking about neuro Dr. Nerve buyer's ally of the Metformin team project at Albert Einstein University will be on the show khariar Hi deaq is a cardiologist is doing some amazing things with longevity. Gordon lauch from the University of Zagreb, the V world expert on glycans, we'll be talking about lichen age and other things. Sandra,

Stephen Sideroff 40:26

Peter Diamandis,

Robert Lufkin  40:28

Peter Diamandis, yes, of course, the longevity XPrize or the or the XPRIZE. And we no guarantees, but we're hoping that when we do our summit, we may be able to talk about a new longevity X PRIZE. So we'll keep you posted on that. Also, Mark Hyman will, will be will talk to you about his presentation in our next session as well. And many, many more. So, thanks so much, Steve, for joining us. And thank you everyone for listening, and we look forward to seeing you next time.

Unknown Speaker 41:12

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