132-Journey to Longevity

Picture this – you're a teenager, on the brink of exploring life, and you're told you have a brain tumor. That's exactly what happened to our guest, Chris Mirabile, who turned a life-altering experience into a catalyst for personal transformation. Listen in as Chris shares his journey from a brain tumor survivor to a health and wellness advocate, emphasizing the need to consider both short-term and long-term effects of lifestyle choices. His insights on the potential risks associated with prescription drugs are truly eye-opening.

Now, imagine embarking on a personal quest to find the perfect nutrition plan for longevity. We've all been there, exploring different diets like the USDA pyramid, the paleo and ketogenic diets. You'll be amazed at how simple dietary tweaks can make a significant impact on your health. Remember, it's not about following a diet trend, it's about finding what works best for you.

Ever wondered about your biological age and how it affects your longevity? We've got you covered! Together with Chris, we take a deep dive into the science of aging. Furthermore, we explore epigenetic methylation clocks and telomere length to evaluate biological age and morbidity risk. This episode will profoundly alter the way you understand aging and longevity. Tune in, and let's explore the secrets to living not just a longer life, but a healthier one.

ReverseAgingRevolution Summit June 20-22, 2024 https://robertlufkinmdcom.ontralink.com/t?orid=49&opid=2

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome back to the Health Longevity Secret Show, and I'm your host, dr Robert Lufkin. This episode delves into a fascinating story of a brain tumor survivor and how he transformed his life, not only to arrest the tumor, but also to begin a mission to slow his aging using more than a dozen epigenetic, metabolomic and physiologic markers. Chris Moraboli is the founder and CEO of Novo Slabs and also a blogger at Slow my Age Full disclosure. I, along with George Church and Matt Caberline, are on the scientific advisory board of Novo Slabs, but I do that because I'm excited about the work they're doing and I believe in their mission. Now please enjoy this week's episode. Hey, chris, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Thank you, rob, it's great to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Yeah, I'm so excited to hear about your personal journey. I want our audience to hear about it because it's so compelling what you went through, that sort of set you on this course in your life. If you could share that with us, it would be great.

Speaker 2: 1:17

Sure, sure, happy to. I've seen many Starks at a young age, younger than most when it comes to longevity. So when I was 12 years old, I started getting into exercise and fitness. I saw an issue of Men's Health Magazine at the bookstore and I was inspired by the people in that magazine. So I started exercising and watching my diet, which, as I'm sure you remember back then, was about low fat and high protein and as many carbs as you wanted.

Speaker 2: 1:48

And it came as that much more of a surprise to me when, just a few years later, when I was 16 years old, I was on a school trip in New York City and it was just me and my teacher. Next thing I knew, I was listening to a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Manhattan and I suddenly got dizzy and nauseous. And next thing I knew, I woke up and I had blood all over my shirt and the room was cleared out and it was only my teacher and the security team at the Fed Bank, because they were afraid for their gold storage in the basement. And all of the blood was the result of me having a seizure and severing my tongue, and it turned out after they rushed me to the emergency room. It was caused by a brain tumor larger than a golf ball. It was on my left temporal lobe and it was bumping up against the hippocampus and they needed to do emergency surgery and radiation within just a few days. So, fortunately, I've obviously lived through the experience and I can tell the story, though I do joke about half of my brain being missing, so if I ever forget anything, that's the excuse. But going through that experience, it was transformative. I consider it to be a blessing to have had the opportunity at that age to see that side of life and to confront mortality and the chance of actually passing away. It made me value life that much more. Understand the fragility of life Made me want to do everything I could to avoid being in a position like that again, if I could help it, and it transformed me as a person. I went from playing on the high school football team to writing poetry on Friday nights instead of going out with friends and reflecting on the experience. So it was an eye-opening experience and it planted a seed for me which eventually blossomed into the company I founded, novos. But all the while we're talking now, a couple of decades between other events and me starting the company.

Speaker 2: 3:53

I ended up becoming a technology entrepreneur, but in my free time I was still every bit as intensely focused on health and wellness, and so I would turn to PubMed to do research and to learn about different topics and any curiosities I had. I would go straight to the scientific papers or listen to some podcasts with some MDs or PhDs and I would self-experiment with different diets, different sleep hacks, different supplements. And then I, of course, would biotrack. I would be doing the n equals one experiments with things like Apple Watch or, back then, like a polar heart rate strap. Now I use the ORA ring and so on.

Speaker 2: 4:38

So I've always had been quantitative and data-driven and looking to just improve my health, not only for today but, I think, most importantly for tomorrow, for the long term, because, as you know, being a medical doctor, oftentimes what's recommended by the medical establishment or even the wellness community is oftentimes short-sighted. It's for a very short-term goal but it's not always looking at long-term outcomes. What can happen from this lifestyle intervention or this prescription drug, not in the next year or two, but in 10 years or 20 or 30 years down the road?

Speaker 1: 5:13

Oftentimes that's not contemplated, but that's something that has always been a focus of mine is both short-term and long-term consequences, because of my experience, yeah, I mean you had a close encounter with a medical establishment there very intensive and then you began looking at lifestyle things and other factors that you felt were not being properly communicated. What are some of those things that you discovered that you think that maybe the current healthcare establishment, or at least back then, wasn't adequately communicating to you?

Speaker 2: 5:52

I'll give you a more general example that I actually wrote about in a blog post of mine. I have a blog called Slow my Age. One of the articles I talk about how, for example, if you have indigestion, if you have gastric reflux, the doctor might tell you to take something like nexium Nexium once a prescription drug is now available over the counter. What most people don't realize is that nexium should only be taken for a few weeks or a few months, just until symptoms subside. Ideally, you should actually be figuring out what the root cause is. Presumably it's oftentimes caused by your diet, the types of foods that you're ingesting. If you're taking it for a long period of time, it has a higher incidence of cancer. It reduces your body's ability to absorb a lot of critical nutrients. It's really not intended for people to take for years.

Speaker 2: 6:49

I have family members who like to eat their spicy foods and their fried foods and so on, and they get a lot of gastric reflux from it. They are permanently on nexium. Their doctor has never even made them aware that it's not a long-term solution. My concern is that oftentimes there's recommendations for some short-term acute condition that should stay short-term and acute, but it actually ends up becoming chronic because people aren't adapting their lifestyles. They're not understanding fully why these symptoms and side effects are taking place. They look at it as well. Let me just take this drug that's going to solve all problems without understanding that there's actually going to be problems down the line, down the road, if they don't address the root cause. Which is actually the foundation of preventative medicine in the first place is being aware of what can cause these illnesses in the long term and stopping them before they actually progress in the first place. As you know, the medical establishment traditionally is not particularly good at the preventative side of things. That's partly why longevity is such a refreshing take on this space.

Speaker 1: 8:02

Yeah, and certainly a lot of modern medicine is directed at treating the symptoms of disease and the danger of that is that by treating the symptoms the patient sort of forgets about the disease and oftentimes, with many of the chronic diseases as we're talking about, the disease progresses even though the symptoms go away. The classic example is someone with a heart attack, which is from narrowing of the coronary arteries to the heart and limiting the amount of blood to the heart. The most common treatment today for that, for an acute heart attack, is to place a stent which mechanically opens the vessel and for many patients they think you know, wow, that I'm treated, I'm better when really you're literally only treating the symptoms. And of course, the coronary artery disease progresses if you don't change your lifestyle and the stent even the stent will reclog off and narrow, narrow again. One of the things go ahead.

Speaker 2: 9:12

Sorry to interrupt, but you had asked me a personal example. One came to mind while you were speaking. I can give you a quick one. So you know, after my brain tumor and recovery I was having trouble focusing and my memory was kind of shot, partly from the inflammation, partly from the antiseizure medication and so on. But eventually, when I was off of all of that, I was still having issues.

Speaker 2: 9:37

And so the medical establishment recommends taking an ADHD drug, namely Adderall or Ritalin. And then in the wellness community I mentioned that the wellness community isn't always perfect either there are some influencers in that space that have recommended taking drugs like Medaphino, again a prescription drug, that we don't really know what the long term side effect of up regulating histamine in the brain is actually going to have right in decades to come. So when I didn't want to go down this path and I did research of my own and I looked at, for example, my genetics with 23 and me analysis and then fed that into third party tools which highlighted that, for example, I have the well known MTHFR C6770 homozygous mutation, I realized, huh, maybe I could use more B vitamins.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Maybe I could expand on that a little bit for our audience if you don't mind. Yeah, that's an important concept.

Speaker 2: 10:36

Happy to. So it's relatively well known, at least in wellness circles. If you search for it online, a lot of people like to call it something else, if you can imagine MTHFR, what that kind of sounds like. And it's called that because of the negative effects that this genetic polymorphism can have on our ability to methylate and to detoxify the body. And methylation, as you can speak to Rob, is a critical body function for, for for unlimited different reactions that are taking the body, as well as the epigenome and essentially expression of our genes, which genes are turned on and off. So it's critically important and, believe it or not, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of around 40% of the population has a heterozygous mutation, so they they are not fully methylating. And then if you have a homozygous mutation where both genes are mutated, like I do that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 or 16%, depending on that ethnicity then your your methylation can be down regulated by, I believe, as much as around 70% or so, and so you want to try to accommodate this or account for this down regulation of the method, methylation. So there are ways to do it. For example, certain be vitamins can help to increase the methylation method, donors, which you can get from nutrients like Colline, which are found in egg yolks, or try methyl glycine, tmg, which is a supplement also known as B Tain there's there's a number of different supplements you can take to bring your your body back up to a more normal state of methylation. So that's one thing. I was also deficient in magnesium and some other critical nutrients. So, after digging into my genetic profile, also doing some research and looking at different blood labs and what are common deficiencies or insufficiencies for adults in America, magnesium being one of them, but there are many others we can talk about and then decided to supplement and low and behold, the attention difficulties disappeared, they subsided, I was able to focus without having to take a prescription drug.

Speaker 2: 13:02

Now why am I concerned about? About Adderall specifically. It's just one that we can pick on, because Adderall the analogy I like to give is that it's kind of like a fire hose. So it's it's and when I say fire hose, that's for like the dopamine and the neuroepinephrine. So these neurotransmitters that are what keep us alert and attentive, particularly if we're being chased by a tiger or a lion. Right and evolutionary terms, it releases a very large amount of that, and so what can happen is we first of all the receptor sites for these different neurotransmitters start to down regulate because there's so much of it, and then you tend to need to increase the dosage over time and then, if you ever eventually go off of it, it's.

Speaker 2: 13:46

It's very commonly reported in online forums that people fall into depression and that can last a long time, and there's also a lot of oxidative damage that can come from that much release of these neuro transmitters. So overall, it's not something that I want to use, and I'm not even talking about the cardiovascular implications of Adderall, which is something that's also been studied. So overall, I want to figure out what the root cause of me not being attentive and able to focus was. I was able to successfully do that. It takes some patience. It's not a quick fix, but ultimately I'm much healthier for putting put that effort in.

Speaker 1: 14:24

You mentioned earlier a lot of, a lot of the speakers on on this program and and a lot of our audience is questioning or looking at the value of nutritional changes in the beginning. Just to go back one thing you mentioned that you were on a low fat diet following the pyramid and the USDA and the genetic conditions. How was your thinking on that changed or is that? Is that a factor here as well?

Speaker 2: 14:58

So so it did. There is this, this period where I was experimenting with different diet. So in my late 20s it became the paleo diet. I was a fan at the time of the perspective of let's eat the foods that we evolved with. It makes a lot of rational, logical sense. And then my thinking has has evolved from that where it is not that necessarily foods that we evolved with our next are ideal for us today. Now, many of them might be, but there might actually be other foods that are even more ideal for us today. And so I think that from the perspective of longevity and what's going to increase our health spend and lifespan because evolution just cares about us living long enough to procreate and to be able to take care of the children, or maybe as long as the grandchildren, but not not that far. That's really just to instill the wisdom to later generations. But after that evolution doesn't really care about our life spans. So if we're talking about living to 90, 100 or longer, we might want to look at diet in a different way. So the paleo diet I then kind of converted it into like a paleo keto style diet. So this is now in my early 30s, almost a decade ago now, and that was all the all the rage at the time.

Speaker 2: 16:13

I found some, some benefits from the ketogenic diet and and then I also found some costs for and part of the reason why I may have found some costs is because I'm very physically active. I have a low body fat percentage and it's going to impact me differently than somebody who might have a low body fat, for example, where they've got the stores of of lipids that they can tap into when when they're on on a on a ketogenic diet. I also think that I was probably just not eating enough food on that ketogenic diet. I didn't have as much hunger as I do when I'm eating carbohydrates in my diet, and so I was probably also more hypochloric more often than than I probably should have been, but I just couldn't force myself to eat that much more. But side effects that I know this from the diet were that I first of all, my mood would change. I was very focused, even better than than normal, but I was not as optimistic and positive as I would be normally when I eat carbs. This is very unique to me. I'm not saying that this is for other people. Also, my libido was shot. It disappeared pretty much. So there's something hormonally happening as well, and what I found was that if I wanted to do a ketogenic diet and every so often I still go into ketosis I would prefer to do it for short periods of time, like maybe a week or two weeks in keto and then bringing carbs back into my diet. I've noticed that my athletic performance is better by doing that as well. But I did experiment with that and spent a lot of time researching the, the benefits of potential benefits of the ketogenic diet and measuring my blood ketone levels and and all of that right.

Speaker 2: 17:59

So, and more recently, like where I find myself now, is a modified version of the Mediterranean diet. So research finds that the Mediterranean diet, at least for the sake of longevity, is perhaps the best diet that we can subscribe to. So, everything from different diseases like cardiovascular disease or neurodegenerative diseases, people who are on Mediterranean diets tend to fare better. There's been recent analysis of the epigenomes of people who are on Mediterranean diets compared to other types of diets like vegetarian and vegan and carnivore diets and so on, and it's been found that the Mediterranean diet has slower biological rate of aging. And so we at my company, we've slightly modified the Mediterranean diet. We call it the Novos Longivarii diet. The foundation of it is Mediterranean, that's 90% of the diet.

Speaker 2: 18:59

But then there are little tweaks that we make in terms of, for example, reducing the dairy consumption and replacing that, because dairy contains a number of things like galactose, for example. Most people aren't aware of galactose not lactose, but galactose and galactose has actually been found to accelerate aging. It's used in mouse studies to accelerate the aging of mice and that's something that, being longevity minded, we want to avoid. That molecule. It's not as present in Jesus because of the fermentation process. It's still there, but it's less. I still have some cheese in my diet, but I don't have regular milk in my diet. There's a number of different tweaks. We have it on our website If you go to novoslabscom slash diet. I don't want to focus too much on all of the specifics of that.

Speaker 1: 19:48

Yeah, yeah, no, but you bring out an important point that we're all different, our bodies all react differently to things and what one nutritional type may work for one person may not work in the others, and we always have to pay attention to our body and look what works. One thing with Mediterranean diet how do you feel about grains? Some people are critical of the pro-inflammatory aspect of the proteins and the gluten and everything.

Speaker 2: 20:17

Yeah, so that's one of the other tweaks, right? So I mentioned milk. Another tweak that we make is to try to replace as many of those grains as possible with vegetables, with mushrooms especially. Mushrooms have a lot of healthy compounds in them and a lot of people don't include those in their diets. And then if you are going to have grains, ideally it's like the ancient grains, like quinoa, for example. Also consider maybe sweet potatoes or purple potatoes. They are starchy, but if you're having vegetables and olive oil and protein in your meal and then you're having that towards the end of the meal, it's not going to have the same impact on your blood glucose as it would be if you're just eating a potato on its own with nothing else.

Speaker 1: 21:01

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All these chronic diseases as you transitioned and you became more interested in longevity. What's the tie between longevity and these chronic diseases? How are they related?

Speaker 2: 21:22

Well. So there's, I guess, a couple of ways to answer that question. One is that when you have one of these chronic diseases, the timer starts in terms of your lifespan right. So if you get a chronic disease when you're in your 50s, the chances you're going to live until you're 90 or 100 is much, much lower than if you're able to stave off that disease for a longer period of time. So the other way to look at it is just that longevity medicine in general, it's looking at aging as a disease.

Speaker 2: 21:55

I know that's a controversial statement and whether you agree with that or not doesn't really matter. In my mind, what matters is that aging, the aging process itself, is the common denominator for these chronic illnesses, diseases of aging, so to speak. So the number one risk factor, for example, for lung cancer is not cigarette smoke, it's aging. And if you go down the list of most forms of cancer not all, but most forms of cancer cardiovascular disease and strokes, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia, parkinson's, sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass as we age, type two, diabetes and metabolic disorders, glaucoma I mean, just go down the list the number one risk factor for all of these is aging. So if you have a pro longevity mindset and you are trying to live a life that is focused on longevity as the lens through which you are looking at the health decisions, the lifestyle decisions you're making. You're not only going to reduce the odds for these diseases or delay them. You will, by extension, increase lifespan because the diseases are taking place later or not occurring in the first place, and you're also going to improve your health here and now.

Speaker 2: 23:18

So when I started Novos, one of the unique selling propositions and the perspectives that we took and this was after consulting with a lot of scientists in the field was to address all 12 hallmarks of aging. At the time there were nine. Now there are 12, all 12 hallmarks of aging simultaneously, and these hallmarks of aging are essentially the biological causes of aging, right? So your audience is probably familiar with some of them. You know common terms like mitochondrial dysfunction or stem cell rejuvenation, but then there are other less commonly known ones, like cellular senescence is starting to become popularized, but it's a lesser known term loss of proteostasis.

Speaker 2: 24:02

So there's a dozen of these, and if you have a pro longevity lifestyle and, by extension, you're going to be addressing these and what's important is that, that then means that you're going to be more biologically optimized today as well. So it's not like you're just buying an insurance policy and you're seeing your money disappear for the possibility that you know, sometimes decades down the road you're going to need to redeem that. You're not only getting that, but you're also getting short-term benefits, so it's better than a life insurance policy. You're getting things here and now when you have this type of perspective on health.

Speaker 1: 24:40

So there are obvious advantages to attacking aging or going after achieving longevity that benefits all these chronic diseases, so everything's really linked together there. So when you started this, what did you see out there that wasn't being done in the longevity space? In other words, you founded a company. What does this company hope to accomplish that other people weren't doing or that other people had overlooked?

Speaker 2: 25:11

So I'll give a quick story about that. So when I was let's see, at this point I'm in my early 30s and I had come across the paper the Hallmarks of Aging in the journal Cell, and this was it's now considered a seminal paper for the longevity space. They since updated it to 12 hallmarks this year, those same authors. But back then that was a moment of epiphany for me because I saw, as I was mentioning, like I wanted to look at my health not only for short-term goals like better focus or better athletic performance and so on, but I also wanted to think of long-term is this going to help me or hurt me? Decades down the road, and I never really had a clear understanding of how to look at that. But when I came to this paper, that's when I saw oh wow, we actually understand what is causing us to age in the first place not completely, but a large amount of that aging process We've understood. And so, if I can look through this lens when I think about the health decisions that I'm making, I in theory will be able to make more informed, better decisions. And so fast forward.

Speaker 2: 26:26

A few years after that, I started attending events in the biology field. In fact, it was a coincidence, serendipity, that I came across an event at NYU Medical Center, so I was volunteering there. That's where my brain tumor was removed, and so I was volunteering in the pediatric ward where I was treated, just spending time with the kids there, and I was doing it four hours a week for a few years. I suddenly came across this poster on the wall for the mitochondrial summit, which most people would walk right past it, but I got all excited seeing researchers' names whose work I was familiar with and I said I got to go to this event. So I went, and that's when it really started, because I started talking to the researchers, the scientists, and asking them questions about different molecules natural over-the-counter molecules that were associated with these different hallmarks of aging and having favorable effects on them, and I wanted to hear from them firsthand. Are these ingredients actually going to have a positive effect on the aging process or is it all hype Like? Does it require a pharmaceutical intervention like rapamycin, or is it something that we can actually derive significant benefits from over-the-counter ingredients? And I honestly didn't know what a scientist would say about that. I was actually pleasantly surprised when they were telling me how bullish, how enthusiastic they were about these different types of molecules and the impact that they could potentially make on aging, and when I presented the concept, the idea of addressing all hallmarks simultaneously, they got very excited, saying that's probably the best way to put a dent in the aging process if you address all hallmarks at the same time.

Speaker 2: 28:07

Because, as you very well know, it's this complex web, these hallmarks of aging, right, if you have DNA damage, you're going to accelerate telomere attrition, you're going to accelerate inflamaging. All of these things are interconnected with each other. So if you only fix one thing for example, take the analogy of a car If you have an old car and you only fix the tie, or you fix the tire and you ignore the engine and the oil you need to put it in, and so on it's only a matter of time before that car breaks down again, right? So this perspective was new to them. It was not anything in the market. And, specifically to your question, what was not being done in the space?

Speaker 2: 28:50

Well, when it comes to actual longevity science, not talking about yesterday's industry of anti-aging is really just not based on strong science and it's largely just aesthetics, like hiding the signs of aging with a skin cream or something, but actually addressing the underlying causes of aging.

Speaker 2: 29:08

There wasn't really anything strong out there coming from this perspective of the hallmarks of aging and the latest research in the space.

Speaker 2: 29:15

So the only work that was being done was on the biotech side and the pharmaceutical side, and these things I saw as not being accessible for the vast majority of people. Whether the odds I was going to get a doctor to prescribe these to me that I would be able to afford them, much less my friends and family, who are even less inclined to do this than I am, the answer was not very likely. So I wanted to create something that I could take, I could give to my loved ones, I could release it for the community at large to be able to use it as well and find benefits from. And nothing existed at that point. There were small attempts in this space, but nothing revolutionary, like some companies selling nicotine on my riboside, maybe terrorists still being, but like there wasn't really much being done. And so we created this formulation that we filed for patents on. That is like I mentioned the first to address all 12 hallmarks and to do so in a relatively aggressive but safe way.

Speaker 1: 30:17

Yeah, I think one of the good things about attacking a chronic disease like diabetes, type two diabetes or heart attack you can look at a marker like the A1C levels and immediately tell if it goes up or down, or you can do a coronary calcium score and look at the calcium. The challenge for longevity although it hits all the most of the chronic diseases, of course the challenge is how we track longevity, because the obvious thing you can wait till someone dies. But with any of these interventions, ideally it's good to have something that tells us we're on the right path or not and we're doing the right thing. And so how do you look at that? As far as monitoring, what are your go-to tests? How do you feel what should people use to monitor their longevity if they're in one of these programs, like you have, or any longevity program, what do you recommend?

Speaker 2: 31:19

Yeah, so there's a spectrum, and that spectrum depends on who the stakeholder is Like. We as a company are going to do a lot more when it comes to scientific R&D than an end user will be doing. So, specifically to your question of what someone in your audience can do, there's a number of markers I actually track some of them on my blog that I mentioned before Slow my Age and I share how I was able to reduce my biological aging by approximately 39%, and this is coming from a wide range of tests. So we can talk about a few of those tests. But then, if you care, I can also talk about how we validate our product. We do in vitro studies, we do animal studies, we do human studies, and that's a whole other set of larger populations improving it out in that case.

Speaker 2: 32:09

But for individuals, some of the things that I've measured, for example, my telomere length, my telomeres, or all of our telomeres these are the end caps of our chromosomes that protect our DNA. They get shorter with time and, based on cellular divisions, telomeres are not directly correlated to our biological or chronological age. I mean there is a correlation, but it's not that strong. It's probably 0.3 or 0.4. What is stronger or what they're more important to look towards for, is if you reach what's called the telomere brink, so the point at which your telomeres have become too short, and I believe that that is about five kilobase pairs. So it's kind of like a check off the box metric. You can see if your telomeres are getting too short. There are things you can do to slow down telomere attrition. There are things that can even lengthen telomeres, but for that the measurements I got was that my telomere age was 29.4 years younger than my chronological age, so that implies 79% slower aging. Now, that's pretty extreme. I don't think I'm actually an eight year old, so I take it with a grain of salt, but it is in a very healthy range.

Speaker 2: 33:26

Now the things that I'm more excited about are these epigenetic methylation clocks. We mentioned methylation earlier, about the genetic polymorphism, mthfr, and how that inhibits the methylation process. Well, methylation is part of the epigenome. So the epigenome is a layer that kind of sits on top of your genes and determines which genes should be turned on and off. Sort of like if your genes are the piano, your epigenome is the piano player, and when you're young it might come out like a beautiful Tchaikovsky symphony, and when you're older, you might start like missing some keys or you hit the wrong key, or you hit a key too hard or another key too soft, so it's no longer sounding the way that it was supposed to. And what that actually means for us is certain cells are not behaving the way that they're supposed to behave. They're being programmed to behave differently, so to speak. But there are patterns that emerge and there are algorithms that can then detect these patterns and essentially tell you how old you are biologically.

Speaker 2: 34:36

Now there's a lot of misconceptions in this space where people think they take it literally or they present it as if it's literal. So for me, for example, at nearly 40 years old, my biological age says I'm about 25. I'm not 25 years old, I don't look 25 years old, but the way that I interpret this is that this is correlated to my morbidity and mortality risk. So I have probably about the risk of getting an illness or passing away, as a typical 25 year old would, which I think is a lot more realistic. But there are still other aspects of me, like my appearance, that are still aging.

Speaker 2: 35:15

So, with that said, I've done 10 different epigenetic clocks. They average to 39% slower aging and the one I care most about is called true age. Sorry, not true age. It's called a do, need and pace. The do need and pace clock is based on research done at Columbia and Duke University. It is the most precise and accurate of the biological age clocks out there. It's a third generation clock. There are first and second generation clocks out there on the market that are just not as accurate, not as powerful, not as precise. And what's unique about the do need and pace clock is it tells you your pace of aging at this point in time. So, for example, if your result is one that means that every one chronological year you're aging at a rate of one biologically, if you got a 0.69, which is my result that implies 31% slower aging at this point in time. If you smoke a pack a day, you're probably gonna get 1.2 or something like that. You're aging 20% faster than people.

Speaker 2: 36:25

What's really interesting about all of this and it's a really nice way to depict it is the researchers in their scientific paper.

Speaker 2: 36:33

When they published it, they took the 10 slowest aging, the 10 average aging and the 10 fastest aging people in their cohort, both male and female, and they use computer software to merge the faces, and so they showed what the average of the 10 slowest aging male and females look like, and the same for average aging and then fastest aging, and when you look at them they're all, I believe, 45 years old.

Speaker 2: 36:59

When you look at them side by side, the difference is so stark. You look at that slowest aging group and compare it to the fastest aging group and it looks like they're 20 years different in terms of their chronological age, when they're actually chronologically equal. And it's just biological differences and that just goes to show. It's a manifestation of what's also happening internally to our organs and our risk of disease and so on, of the lifestyle decisions we make and if we're living a pro-longivity lifestyle versus one that isn't. There are other tests we can talk about, like physiological markers, things like VO2 max, max heart rate, even metabolomic clocks, which are cutting edge and not really ready for the mainstream yet, but they're starting to be put together. Happy to talk about those as well, but any direction you want.

Speaker 1: 37:49

The DNA epigenetic methylation clocks you mentioned are very powerful, but an important point I just wanted to underscore was the third generation, dunedin-pace-based kind of clocks. They measure acceleration of aging or the rate of change of aging. What are the first two generations? Could you just tell us that for our audience, because those are still available, some of them on the market as well, so you can ask what type of test you're getting.

Speaker 2: 38:18

If you're going to purchase a epigenetic methylation test for age, biological age- yes, so the first generation is made famous by the person who essentially invented them, steve Horvath. And so if you hear of like the Horvath clock, for example, that is a first generation clock that is trained on chronological age. So when they first came up with the idea for this, as you might imagine, they were trying to predict how old the test subject is without actually seeing that person and knowing anything about them, just taking their blood, looking at their epigenome and predicting how old they are chronologically. After they did that, they came to the realization that what's perhaps more important is not trying to pinpoint how old they are chronologically, but to understand that there's a difference in biological age and that that's actually more important to predict things like morbidity and mortality. So that's when second generation clocks came into existence, the better known ones and the more powerful ones. One is Morgan Levine had the pheno age clock, pheno meaning phenotype, so basically the manifestations of our health. And then there's the grim age clock.

Speaker 2: 39:33

The grim age clock was a project that Steve Horvath was involved in and that that's actually a very powerful second generation clock in terms of predicting mortality. The grim age clock and the do, need and pace clock are neck and neck. They're practically the same level of accuracy for that. But then when you get to predicting morbidity and predicting quality of life, so quality of life would be like your ability to have proper gait, your grip strength, your ability to stand up from the floor without needing help, these things that are markers of aging and quality of life. The do need and pace clock is the best for that as well. So quality of life, morbidity, do need and pace is best. And then for mortality, do need and pace and grim age, the second generation clock are neck and neck with each other.

Speaker 1: 40:27

Yeah, and certainly these. Like you say, the methylation clocks and the metabolomic clocks are coming, but the methylation clocks are sort of the gold standard, now the cutting edge, I guess. The downside is they're expensive, on the order of a couple hundred dollars or so, depending on how you get them done. So you might want to do it once in a while. Is there any longevity? What's a go to inexpensive test? Do you think a marker that someone who's following your plan or on a longevity path that they could check on a weekly basis or something like that? Any grip strength or what's good to check, do you think?

Speaker 2: 41:13

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, if you're going to do something like grip strength, you need to do it consistently and then look at the trend of that data, because things like even just dehydration or poor sleep the night before or exercising the day before can all have a significant impact on what your grip strength is going to be for that day. So you would need to make sure you're doing this long enough and enough measurements to be able to track the trend line, and a lot of people probably aren't going to do it methodically enough to really be able to rely on that. You know there are other things like, for example, vo2 max is very strongly correlated with lifespan and health, so this is the maximum oxygen volume that our bodies can can absorb per minute, and so it different devices like, for example, the Apple Watch and Polar and Garmin devices and so on. They have algorithms to measure VO2 max. They're not going to be perfectly accurate compared to if you went to a lab and had it done professionally, where they put the mask on your face and they're measuring your CO2 output, but, with that said, they are pretty precise. So, if you're really just, I think what's most important is to make sure you're trending in the right direction, that you're increasing your VO2 max and, with that said, they're not that far off in terms of accuracy.

Speaker 2: 42:39

Like mine was 55.5 ml Last time I got it professionally tested and my Apple Watch was only a couple of points below that. So it's right in that neighborhood. So I think that that's a good one that people you know if you do some, you know, depending on your age, might determine how intensely you exercise and do cardiovascular exercise. But if you're at least getting into zone two, cardio, and doing that consistently, these watches can predict it. And if you can push yourself to get into like zone four or five just a little bit so that these devices can detect how, like what, your slope is, then you'll get relatively accurate numbers with VO2 max. And as long as you have the device, then it's free. You can test it literally every single day.

Speaker 1: 43:28

Yeah, what one other? Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 43:29

Sorry, what one other, one other idea this this isn't going to be, as it's not going to change as quickly, but we do offer on our website, completely free, something called face age, and face age is facial AI technology. You take a selfie with your smartphone and then the AI is going to, based on more than 12 million people data set, is going to tell you how young you look and then different skin health markers like wrinkles, inflammation, poor size, etc. And so that's not something that is going to change like from one day to the next, but if you wanted to like, maybe once a month or once every couple of months, track it. Just make sure you have the same lighting conditions and you're well hydrated. You can see how your your facial aging is progressing over time, and if you slow down your pace of aging, you'll slow down the facial aging aspect as well, as was demonstrated in that. Do need an example that I gave of the younger and older looking 45 year olds. Yeah, that's a that's a great example.

Speaker 1: 44:29

And well, in our last we're almost out of time here. But one thing I wanted to mention about Novos in particular as a company, or ask you to speak about it a little bit, was, structurally, when you set it up, it's set up as a public benefit corporation. How's that different than a C Corp like Johnson and Johnson or Mercer? What is a public benefit corporation? People may not be familiar with that, that designation.

Speaker 2: 44:55

Yeah, it's not particularly well known, but it's something that I wanted to set the company up as. When I started the company because I I'm doing this for personal passion, right. So between my brain tumor and then, when I was getting started with filing the paperwork and getting Novos started, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and then I unfortunately lost her to it and I was closer to my mother than anyone else in my life. So I dedicated the company to her and you know the pain that that disease causes the individual afflicted with it, but also the family members and friends. It's just, it's at times is unbearable and it's not something that that anyone should have to go through, even if it is a fact of life.

Speaker 2: 45:42

If we can minimize that wherever we can, that's what I want to do, and so by starting Novos as a public benefit corporation, it gives us a little bit more leeway when it comes to the fiduciary responsibility and decisions that I make. So typically for a C Corp, you're expected to maximize shareholder interests at all times. You're looking out for shareholders, you want to maximize profit, and when you're a public benefit corporation, it gives you a little bit more flexibility to make some decisions that are still mindful of shareholders. We are a for profit business, but it gives us flexibility to do things for the public interest. So if I have two decisions, two options, two options for a decision I can make, one of which gives me $10, but does nothing for the public. The other one gives me $9, but does something great for the public, I can take that and still be following the corporate charter and bylaws of the business. So I like having that ability. We're not a nonprofit, we're still for profit, but it gives us something closer to that nonprofit perspective of being able to do things for the public at large.

Speaker 1: 46:54

Yeah, it's great. It's great having that option. How can people follow you on social media, Chris, and also find out about your blog and your company?

Speaker 2: 47:08

Sure, so my company is Novos Labs, so novoslabscom. We're on all of the social networks, from Instagram, x, as it's now called, tiktok and so on, as Novos Labs. And then I have my personal blog where I share my personal lifestyle routine, my biological age results and so on. That's slowmyagecom. And then I'm on X and Instagram as slowmyage.

Speaker 1: 47:36

Oh, that's great. Well, thank you. Oh, and one thing I think you wanted to offer at the end was if people want to go to your site, there's a discount code that they can apply to use for discounts and they can check the amount. It'll be just close later, but a small amount that'll discount if you want to share that with them as well.

Speaker 2: 47:59

Yeah, so for all of our products that we have Formulations, novoscore and NovosBoost, and then we have NovosAge, which is the biological age test. It includes Dunedin-Pace. It also includes a biological age clock and the telomere length. You can enter the code at checkout, LufkinMD, and you'll get that discount applied.

Speaker 1: 48:20

Well, I can certainly remember that one. Thanks, this has been a wonderful hour. Chris, I want to thank you so much for sharing your story and thank you so much for the work you're doing in this space and helping so many people Of course it's a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 48:41

Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1: 48:44

One of the most common questions I get asked which blood tests I rely on most heavily for myself and that's really a whole topic unto itself and I'm going to cover it in future programs. But, simply put, there are about 17 or so biomarkers that I check on myself on a regular basis. Now the way I do it is from my home, with a simple finger stick like this, and then I just mail it in. It costs less than $10 per marker and I get the results right away. If you want to try this test for yourself, you can check my website RobertLufkinMDcom under Secrets and use the code SAVE10, save the number 10, for $10 off. Try it. Let me know how it goes. If you like it, if you're enjoying this program, please hit that subscribe button or, even better, leave a review. Your support makes it possible for us to create the quality programming that we're continually striving for. Also, let us know if there is a certain topic that you would like to see covered or a particular guest that you would like to hear from.

Speaker 3: 49:59

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