Health Longevity Secrets

What If a ‘Good Sugar’ Could Improve Alzheimer’s?

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 239

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What if the most powerful “sugars” aren’t fuel at all, but messages your immune system has been waiting to hear? We sit down with Dr John Lewis, a former professor whose lab uncovered striking cognitive improvements in people with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s after 12 months on a formula built from aloe and rice bran polysaccharides. The science takes us beyond calories and cravings into complex carbohydrates as signaling molecules—shaping inflammation, immune balance, and possibly neuroplasticity.

We unpack polysaccharides 101, separating starch from functional giants like aloe acemannan and rice bran compounds. You’ll hear how these dense, 3D structures can influence CD4/CD8 ratios, natural killer cell activity, TNF-alpha, VEGF, and even CD14 cells tied to neural repair. The clinical story is matched by lived moments from caregivers who witnessed language and daily function return. We also dig into why conventional funding passed on this line of research, the dominance of amyloid-focused paradigms, and the gap between public talk about nutrition and what actually gets resourced.

If you’ve wondered whether food could deliver these effects, we cover the practical realities: aloe gel is mostly water, rice bran is milled off white rice, and even daily brown rice may not supply meaningful doses—especially for older adults managing chronic inflammation. That’s where concentrated, third-party tested, GMP-produced supplementation can fit: small grams-per-day inputs that favor immune modulation without stimulants or sugar spikes. Along the way we explore prevention, aging, and how steady immune signaling may guard brain health long before problems start.

Subscribe for more deep, evidence-led conversations on brain health, nutrition science, and longevity. If this episode challenged your view of “sugar,” share it with a friend and leave a review to help others find the show.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey John, welcome to the program. Thank you, Rob, for having me. I'm excited to have a good conversation with you today.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is this is fascinating stuff. Um I want to dive into polysaccharides and the amazing effects they they can have on our body. Um, but before we do, I'd love I'd love to ask your, you know, you're an accomplished uh past full-time professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at um in the Department of Family Medicine, also at the University of Miami School of Medicine. And um you ran 30 over 30 studies, uh, have 180 peer-reviewed publications, which is which is quite an accomplishment uh inside academic medicine. And so my question is, you've now sort of walked away from all that. You're you're now a volunteer faculty, so still involved there, but uh you you've changed everything. So I wonder what was the red pill moment that pushed you from university research into building a supplement company. And you know, what did you learn from the experience?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you for that kind introduction, and I'm very proud of all that academic work. Unfortunately, the the most exciting work of my career in the university led to me leaving academics, ironically enough. When we published our first paper from our Alzheimer's study that we'll talk about today, I was so excited. I literally was on Cloud Nine thinking that we had discovered something that was going to take my career to places that I could only dream about. We had shown that in response to this dietary supplement that people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease had a clinically and statistically significant improvement in cognitive function according to the ADAS COG, which is the gold standard for assessing cognition, especially in people with any type of dementia. So I was, as you can imagine, I was just incredibly motivated, excited, enthusiastic about this research. And I thought NIH, Alzheimer's Association, I thought these people were would just bend over backward to write checks for us to uh to extend this research, which, oh, by the way, only occurred due to the generosity of this one family who had lost four family members to Alzheimer's. Otherwise, I wouldn't even be talking to you about this. So we published the first paper in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in 2013. I immediately, I was actually had already started working on grant proposals. Over the next four-year period, when I left academics full-time in 17, I tried a couple of times with NIH, a couple of times with Alzheimer's Association, and I got that much in response. And I was went, I went from, you know, on top of the world to I didn't, I wasn't in the valley, I was below it. And it was so, you know, for me, it was just talk about a red pill moment. It was that moment where I realized that these folks in these, you know, whether it's a bureaucracy like NIH, the largest budget of scientific research funding in the world, or people at Alzheimer's Association, I, you know, quite frankly, it doesn't matter to me what they say publicly. And maybe some of that has changed with the new administration with what uh RFK is trying to do at NIH. But back then, at least, them, you know, those folks talking about their interest in nutrition publicly, they did not, at least in my case, they did not back it up. And so it was very discouraging for me. And I just kind of had this moment where it was like, well, if I'm not doing pharmacology or I'm not doing genetics, you know, I'm kind of like the I'm kind of like the outsider, right? Like I'm not part of the the click or the boys club where you're gonna get the kind of funding that these people want to fund because it leads down the road to some big licensing agreement for either a drug or a genetic test or some other biotech opportunity. And that's not what you have with nutrition or dietary supplements. So that was really it was incredible, right? Like, how ironic is it that the most exciting discovery of my career led me to leaving academics?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, it it and it speaks to what we've we've had conversations with uh others on this program about the the the bias of Alzheimer's disease research for amyloid models and pharmaceuticals, as you say, and things like uh diet or lifestyle approaches have real trouble getting getting support in that. So it certainly makes sense. And it's not just it's not just of course Alzheimer's disease, it's all the major chronic diseases that we that we face. We're we're always looking for a pill. And sometimes the lifestyle choices that actually work aren't you know are ignored for you know for all kinds of reasons. Uh that's right. But all right, well, let's back up a little bit and just we haven't talked about polysaccharides on this program yet as a dedicated topic. So maybe give us the polysaccharides 101, sort of aloe rice brand, kind of structure size, why, what, what, what's it all about?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, maybe we can talk about adding an addendum addendum to your book about the lies you were taught in medical school, because this really leads me down the road of talking about sugar, right? This word sugar, I feel like is the most misused word in nutrition, maybe even in the entirety of health and wellness, simply due to the fact that it's all about context. So when you when you hear someone say all sugar is bad for you, from my perspective, this is not opinion. This is based on my research. That's a that's a completely at best, it's an ignorant statement. And at worst, it's factually incorrect. So the polysaccharides that you just mentioned from aloe vera and rice brand, I would argue are two of the most, if not the most, beneficial compounds that Mother Nature provides for us for a healing effect. And again, that's not opinion. That's based on not just the research from our lab at the University of Miami, but from laboratories all over the world. So when you look at these structures, they are more dense, they are more complex in their structure. They have hundreds, if not thousands, of glucose units attached together by these glycosidic bonds. They're more functionally sophisticated than amino acids, fatty acids, certainly vitamins and minerals, elements, you know, all these other things that we get in the diet. Nothing even comes close to these things, Rob. You can't even draw them on a piece of paper. They're literally like 5D structures. So when you talk about, and especially the ones from aloe vera and rice bran, I mean, those are the two that I've really focused my research on. I don't pretend to know much about the ones from, say, mushrooms or seaweeds. I mean, I know that there are a lot of plants that are getting what I which I'm sure is well-deserved uh notoriety today, but I don't, I haven't worked with those, quite frankly. But when you compare those polysaccharides, and of course, remember, or maybe not remember, if for those of you that don't even know, you have four types of sugars. You have a monosaccharide like high fructose corn syrup, that's basically one uh molecule of sugar, then you have disaccharides, two molecules of sugar like sucrose, then you have oligosaccharides, they're about 10 molecules of sugar, things like uh breast milk, and then you have the polysaccharides. Again, and as I said, they're like hundreds, if not thousands, of glucose units strung together. So they're incredibly different. And I'm certainly gonna be right there with anybody who says, hey, limit your intake of high fructose corn syrup, if not completely avoid it. Sure you want to do that. But if you're talking about all sugar, like in just this one broad brush stroke of all of them being bad for you, again, that's that's just not accurate. And in fact, if you're if you're going around saying that, then help let me help you be educated because that's not true. It's simply not true. Again, based on our research, not my opinion, that these things are just incredibly beneficial. I mean, we've published many papers showing all these different effects from these polysaccharides. So, and unfortunately, nobody eats aloe vera, right? I mean, I we have in Miami we have some aloe vera growing in our backyard, but you know, we're not out there snipping the leaves every day. Uh, the gel is nasty tasting. I mean, it's 99% water. So you really have to get a concentrated source of the powder after you've dehydrated the gel and then separated some of the other uh ingredients from the polysaccharides. And then the rice bran, same thing there. 70 to 80% of the rice sold in the world is white rice. So the bran is like that inner layer, it's between the husk or the hole that we can't eat. That's kind of like cardboard. And then that white endosperm is what we refer to as white rice. So if you're not eating brown rice every day, or most days, I eat brown rice pretty much every day of the week. Uh, you're, and even if you're eating, say, a cup of brown rice every day, you're probably, especially if you're past middle age andor have, you know, like most Americans unfortunately, have multiple health challenges, you're probably barely getting enough of the polysaccharide content there as well. So that's why we've concentrated this thing into a supplement that that really is truly effective. But again, I I just love helping to helping people to kind of tear down this myth about all sugar being bad for us. That's just again factually incorrect.

SPEAKER_01:

So, so let me um let me see if I understand this then. So monosaccharides, at least the ones you mentioned, are are unhealthy, and the disaccharides, certainly the sucrose and all, and the oligosaccharides can be unhealthy, but polysaccharides are different. And it's not all polysaccharides are healthy, right? Because you have starch is a polysaccharide that breaks down into glucose fairly rapidly. That's that's not healthy, right, from a metabolic standpoint, correct?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, again, it's debatable. I mean, it even white rice still has other nutrition in it, it's not just purely uh carbohydrate, but where that real magic material is is within the rice brand. So I mean, I guess it depends on uh, you know, how you view the world of how much carbohydrate intake you think you should be uh receiving or consuming every day. But what we're talking about, Rob, is literally a couple of grams per day. So what does the average American eat today? I don't know, 3,000, 3,500 calories? We're talking not even 10 calories of material for somebody who may have like a very serious health challenge. And of course, maybe it's a good time to mention we're not talking about using nutrition to treat disease, right? We're talking about that's the pharmacological model. The nutritional model is providing the raw materials that the cells need to function properly and hopefully to return to homeostasis if you have some sort of health challenge. So two totally different models. But I mean, I would still argue that you can't you, you know, as I don't know. I mean, of course, the you know, the meat-eating crowd, they're going to argue for zero carbohydrate in the diet. I to me that's kind of preposterous, especially just how I live my own life. But I don't um, again, I try not to, I just try to stay in my own little zone, if you will, of working with the aloe vera and the rice brand. I've just seen so much happen over the last 20 years of my life, both in the in the research lab and even anecdotally with working with individual people. It's incredible. There's got to be something in my opinion, this is an opinion statement. There's got to be something beyond the biochemistry with these polysaccharides. I don't know if it's like a you know a physics answer, maybe a resonant frequency kind of a thing that I would love to delve into as I continue my life and hopefully have more funds for research later at some point. But there's just something very special, and I don't want to call it a miracle. You know, sometimes we think of, oh, well, that was a miraculous thing. That's like somebody being blind and then the next day being able to see again. I'm not talking about stuff like that. I'm talking about providing a material that the that that truly became, I think, because of the density of the information, you know, it's kind of like the way the genes interpret everything that we consume, right? Or even goes through the skin. There is just so much coded information uh in these particular polysaccharides, and that's why my colleagues and I, one of our working theories is why they are so effective because of the amount and the and the depth of the information coded in these materials.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. So so help me put this into a biological context then. So the the shorter chain uh saccharides are you know energy sources and have that function. Now, the polysaccharides, I guess starch you could say is a is an energy source. What about these polysaccharides with aloe and rice? What are they what's their function in nature? Where do they occur naturally, and what happens to them in our bodies that that make this this this fascinating effect?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, again, you're talking about so aloe vera. I mean, I I you've probably heard of people referring to the moringa tree as the tree of life. I refer to the aloe vera plant as the plant of life. It's not just the polysaccharides, it literally has everything in it. I mean, you probably don't even think of aloe vera being a source of amino acids and fatty acids and all these different vitamins, minerals, elements, cofactors, metabolites, but it does. It truly has all of this stuff. But again, where it really is so special is with this particular Ace Manon, acetylated polymanos, allopolysaccharide, there's several different synonyms that people have come up with over time. So, you know, again, these particular carbohydrates, saccharides, sugars, whatever you want to call them, are occurring naturally uh in both the aloe vera and in the rice plant. You know, there's they're just occurring naturally. So we're not doing anything particularly special in terms of uh, you know, either an extraction or a hydrolysis or anything like that. We're just simply concentrating them. In the case of aloe vera, of course, like I said, it's 99% water, the gel. So you you want to get rid of all that water. A lot of times when people hear me lecture about our research and they hear me mention aloe vera, the first thing they think of is what I just said. Oh, well, I'll just drink some aloe vera gel and I'll get the same benefit. You know, unfortunately, it won't work that way. You'll number one, it'll taste like hell. And number two, you would have to drink bucket loads of the gel to get enough concentrated content to actually have any kind of physiological benefit. But to your point, I mean, like, and it's I'm glad you said that because what I knew about saccharides was maybe from you know a couple of lectures in biochemistry as a grad student, thinking that basically they were all just sources of fuel for the cell. I had no clue, like literally no clue, up until meeting Dr. Reg McDaniel about 20 years ago, who trained pathologists who went from running a pathology unit at a hospital in Dallas to practicing nutrition, essentially. And what Dr. McDaniel and his colleagues at Texas AM had showed up until the point of he and I meeting was that they were essentially like recognizing through their research, mostly in animals, some of it in humans, that the polysaccharides had two really key functions. One, they were very anti-infectious, they were looking at several different viruses and bacteria, mostly again in animals. But then number two, and even maybe more importantly for longevity and prevention, that they're very immunomodulatory. So it's almost like they function somehow. And I unfortunately, I don't really have, you know, it's it's so difficult because of the complexity of this topic to uh with 100% certainty describe exactly what's going on physiologically, but they somehow function as like signaling mechanisms for the immune system. And that's again proven out by our research in terms of looking at some of these different cell subsets within the immune system and how they change in response to consuming these polysaccharides. So for me, that would be the best, and I'm sorry if that's not specific enough or, you know, it's only my own limitation. I mean, again, if I had more money than I had since, I would still have been running more studies to help explain some more of these mechanisms. But based on all of the research that we've published to date, uh again, I would classify them sort of generically speaking as signaling mechanisms to the immune system. Somehow our immune system recognizes these polysaccharides to say, hey, I need to balance, you know, this aspect, the pro-inflammatory to the anti-inflammatory side. I need to balance the C D4 to C D8 ratio. I need to turn on more C D14 cells, I need to turn on natural killer cells. I mean, these are things that, you know, again, we've published in our lab over this almost last 20-year period.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so um, let's see, I'll summarize then if I understand it right. Then so these are first of all naturally occurring compounds. They're not made in a lab necessarily, they occur naturally in plants, in the plant kingdom, and they have value for plants, plants make them, uh, and then animals can consume the plants and thus get them. We don't make them ourselves.

SPEAKER_00:

Correct.

SPEAKER_01:

Do we have a minimum daily requirement of these things? Is it like uh like protein, or do we do we have to eat these in order to survive, or is it you know something extra that we do for added benefit?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great I love that question too. So the the body's beautiful inherent intelligence can take fructose, glucose, lactose, galactose, all these other simpler sugars, and then put them together into uh these key polysaccharides when it needs them. And so that's one of again, our one of our working theories why humans have now been subjected to all of this chronic disease over the last, well, what, at least 60 years, maybe even going a little bit before that, before all of these changes in our food system. But so, in that definition, these polysaccharides will never be classified as essential, right? They'll never be like an essential fatty acid or an essential amino acid. So that's one key aspect to this. But yes, I I would love to have at some point, and again, if I had more money than I had, you know, common sense, I would already be working on some of these questions. I would love to know like what that maybe not necessarily an RDI is, but certainly like for you know the average person and not somebody with Alzheimer's or cancer or heart disease or those kinds of things, but just like for average maintenance or average prevention, what would be that key value? I would I would love to dive into that further. I mean, I can give you, you know, some of my suspicions based on my own research and and personal use, but um I don't have an answer to that question. I wish I did, but I don't have an answer. But what I will say is that when I look at all these different um, let's call them tools that we can put in our toolbox to help us be healthy, the only other thing that also doesn't have an RDI and never will is something like curcuminoids, right? I mean, we know that turmeric, curcumin, I mean, gosh, you just go to PubMed, type in the word curcumin, and you're gonna pull up at least, what, 10,000 hits? I don't even know the number at the moment. It's a huge number of articles that have been published on curcumin. So we know that that also is an amazing plant, that if you take so much curcumin every day, you have potentially all these benefits that you will derive from that. It's just that you got to get it in the right formulation because the liver metabolizes it very rapidly. And so if it's not contained in a liposome or a micelle, you're probably wasting your money. But but again, there are lots of things that we know that these phytonutrients, if you want to classify them as that, that if you take these every day, you have all of this incredible opportunity to benefit from.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's um we'll we'll come back to kind of the for normal people health and wellness. But before we before we do that, I just wanted to cover kind of your work in Alzheimer's disease that kind of set the set the ball rolling in some sense. Maybe summarize that. What was the Alzheimer's evidence? We know what moved, how much, how fast.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. So again, as I mentioned, we just due to the fact of this one family that was so generous to give us a gift to do research. Uh, the wife of this husband and wife was listening to Dr. McDaniel give a lecture one day, and he was talking about his anecdotal reports in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And so we ended up having this gift. It was just for me like being in the right place at the right time. Dr. McDaniel had no appointment at a university or a research institution at that time. And he called me up one day and he said, John, we've got an opportunity to do a study. The only thing is that we need to do it in Alzheimer's disease. And, you know, being in Miami, of course, we have lots of elderly people, lots of people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. So it was an easy setting for us to run the study. We chose, based on a lot of his and his colleagues' work previously that I mentioned at Texas AM, this particular formulation that had the key aloe and rice brand in it. We chose people that were at the moderate to severe severity level. As you know, Big Pharma is not interested in folks at that stage. They basically have thrown up their hands. Uh, they don't know what to do for people at that stage, really. I mean, forget having a treatment. As you know, the scientific community can't even cannot even come up with a consensus on what causes this terrible disease, much less uh figure out what to do with it when people have it. But we put them on our form.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say what before I'm sorry to interrupt, but could you just say what moderate to severe is kind of in in everyday terms, so people can get a sense of that if they if so they understand it.

SPEAKER_00:

So, and I'm not a you know a neuropsychologist, so you know, forgive me if if my definition is a little bit different from you know somebody strictly in that field, but basically you have mild, moderate, and severe severity. And so once you get to the moderate to severe level, I mean, you're talking, as you well know, somebody that maybe can't even get out of their chair every day. I mean, we're talking about progressive decline of functionality, progressive loss of memory, progressive loss of executive functioning, like not even knowing how to, you know, write a check to pay a bill, not knowing how to go to the refrigerator and you know get a glass of water and and make something to eat. I mean, we're talking about just truly loss of all of your activities of daily living. I mean, it's just horrific. You know, you just you just progressively keep losing all of these basic abilities that you and I totally take for granted. We don't even think about, oh hey, uh, you know, this is my wife's name, or this is my son's name, or my keys are over here, or my car is parked in the garage, not in the driveway. I mean, you know, just very basic things. So we're talking about losing basically all of that. I mean, it's just it's horrific.

SPEAKER_01:

And and um so what what was the uh what did the study show? What effect was it on these very, you know, moderate or severe patients? What did what did you find out?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it was it was beyond, and I'm already getting chill bones. Every time I tell this story, it just it's so for me, so powerful uh on the human level. It's wonderful to do good work as a scientist, be ethical, spend your money properly, you know, be uh uh a good scientist. But when you can actually help people, to me, that's where the rubber really hits the road. So we put them on our supplement for or on our formula for 12 months. We assessed cognitive function at baseline three, six, nine, and twelve months. We drew blood at baseline and twelve. I wish I had drawn blood at three, six, and nine. I didn't think of that at the time to just bank those samples. But anyway, due to the limit in the budget, we we just drew blood at baseline and 12 months. We showed at 9 and 12 months clinically and statistically significant improvement in cognitive function according to the ADAS COG, which is the gold standard. That's not my opinion. That is the gold standard for assessing cognitive function in people with any type of dementia, let alone Alzheimer's. I mean, that's just Rob, that's an unheard of finding. We published that in 2013, and that's why I was so excited. There's nothing else. You can look at the five FDA approved drugs for dementia, any kind of diet, any dietary supplement, exercise, hyperbaric oxygen, red light therapy, acupuncture, music therapy, sound therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. There is no other study, no other article has shown what we showed in our study. It blew me away. It was one of those moments in my life where I like wanted to like, you know, run around my neighborhood, you know, shouting for joy. I mean, it just was such an incredible moment for me as a scientist. Um, and then on the just to quickly summarize what we what else we showed at the cellular level, over that 12-month period, we showed an improvement in the CD4 to CD8 ratio. That's your helper to your cytotoxic cell ratio, which is important for all of us, not just for people with Alzheimer's disease. We showed reductions in TNF alpha and VEG F vascular endothelial growth factor. Our paper was probably the first paper that ever showed that in Alzheimer's disease in response to a dietary supplement. As you know, those proteins are commonly looked at in heart disease and cancer. I don't know of any other paper that showed that in Alzheimer's disease, like we did. And then finally, we showed a just under a 300%, a 286% increase in C D14 cells over that 12-month period. We know from other research, CD-14s can turn into neurons. So when you put that entire picture together, you have this incredible clinical practical change that then is supported by all of these physiological changes. And I'll show if I can, real quick, I'll point out that, you know, I mentioned clinically and statistically significant. And I want to make sure everybody understands that for those of you not really that knowledgeable about statistics, you can have, if you have hundreds or thousands of units or uh subjects or assessments in your study, the law of large numbers says you'll show statistical significance all over the place. We had 34 people in our trial, but when you have something clinically significant, in this case, a change of four points or more, good or bad, on the 8-S COG is deemed to be clinically significant. So, you know, you can, I mean, there have been lots of papers that I've been published on where we've showed statistical significance. Does it really mean much in the practical or real world? Who knows? But in this case, we showed clinically and statistically significant improvement in cognitive function. So this was the only paper in that 2013 paper, the only paper in my career where I actually had the editor of the journal, Dr. Perry, he's still the editor of that journal. He called me up after we submitted that paper about 30 days later. He goes, John, wow, this is an incredible paper. As soon as we get the reviews back from the reviewer, I'm going to recommend we publish your paper immediately. That was the one and only time that ever happened in my career. So it was just such a rewarding experience. I had caregivers calling me literally in tears as we were running the trial. They could not believe what was happening to their loved one, you know, in terms of things they were saying again, things that they were doing again. It was truly incredible. I'll I'll tell you one other real quick anecdote. The oldest lady in the study, she was 93. She had lived a long time with Alzheimer's, in fact, longer than most people ever will. At baseline, she was in a wheelchair and she could not speak. And we put her in the trial, you know, again, just to try to help this lady on any level, you know, just imagine she would go into the center every day for a little socialization, but nothing else was really being done for her. Shortly before the three-month uh assessment, one day she walked in to the center and she called one of the clinical coordinators by his first name. That guy started crying like a baby. He could not, he was so emotionally just overwhelmed with her response, he couldn't believe it. Even the psychiatrist who was working with us on the study, he said, John, I couldn't believe if these patients were not my own, I wouldn't have believed it. Like if you had just told me this, I wouldn't have believed it. But I've seen this for myself. It was just, it was overwhelming for the people, the caregivers, the staff, all of us. I mean, it was just truly such a rewarding experience to run that clinical trial. And that's what motivates me today, still.

SPEAKER_01:

And so after that, that really exciting, promising results initially, uh, eventually you've pivoted now to make this available uh to be Clear, it's it's not sold as a medical uh treatment now for Alzheimer's, but it's available for everybody uh to take through your supplementation program. And so, how does this help people who don't have Alzheimer's disease? What's the what's the benefit there?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, this is a great question, and you know, for for folks like yourself in the prevention and the longevity space, I I love to to to again, if I had more money than I had know what to do with, I would love to be researching these topics along the way. So if we can kind of with you know, sort of pull ourselves out of this um Alzheimer's space and look at this and say, okay, you know, as I mentioned, as you know, the CD4-CD8 ratio, that's a very important measure of overall immune system functioning for every single person, not just for people with Alzheimer's disease. Keeping inflammation under control, chronic inflammation, we know that's a very serious problem with all these chronic diseases we're being just bombarded with on a societal level that we can't even afford today. Increasing our adult stem cell production, we know that once we hit the age of what, around 30, 35, that capacity starts going down. So all these different things, I mean, we can talk about hopefully the MS study at another time, but just very quickly, in the MS study, we showed a reduction in infection, which was very uh very much consistent with all the animal um research that Dr. McDaniel had conducted prior to that. In a fourth paper that we published, actually in the in the two previous uh, I'm sorry, the two subsequent papers we published from the Alzheimer study, we showed an increase. It wasn't statistically significant, but we showed an increase in brain brain-derived neurotropic factor. That's a very important protein for creating memory, for neuroplasticity, for helping our hippocampus function properly. And then in the fourth paper we published from the Alzheimer study, we showed an incredible rebalancing of the TH1 to TH2 ratio. This is a really interesting marker of our relationship between our pro-inflammatory side and our anti-inflammatory side of our immune system. And we want to try to keep those in balance as much as we can because, again, we're trying to keep this chronic inflammation story in check. So I would argue that all of these different things are applicable to all of us. We and at the root of all of that is keeping our immune system functioning and surveillant and modulated properly, because as you know, it uh the immune system is such an important player and character in our overall health in terms of its crosstalk and keeping every other major organ system in balance and regulated.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and and since since you you mentioned these are we we talked about these are available in rice bran and aloe vera and all, they're available in foods. Why why shouldn't people just eat more rice bran and aloe vera? What's the advantage of getting it through supplementation?

SPEAKER_00:

So I would excuse me, I uh that's a great question as well. I would say for in our particular case, in terms of the amount, and this kind of goes back to one of your earlier questions about the amount or the dose, I would say because we've evaluated these particular amounts, this is a sort of a uh, you know, a credible way to look at how much you can actually consume in in our in the the case of our particular product, it's an amount that's already been clinically tested. So we know that this amount works. I mean, again, I don't know that there's anything I don't know that there's anybody out there, I mean, that eats aloe vera. You know, it just it tastes nasty. Uh, it would be very difficult to have your own aloe vera farm to where you could actually have enough of that uh polysaccharide from the aloe vera. On in the case of brown rice, I would say sure, eat your half a cup to cup of brown rice every day. I mean, that's a great source of nutrition that has all of these polysaccharides. But if you're, in my view of the world, again, this is more opinionated than anything else, if you're past middle age, and if you're past middle age with, you know, diabetes or some form of cancer or heart disease or neurodegeneration, one of the major killers, you probably need more support than what you're going to get just purely from food. And so we've, you know, in a sense, we've really done the hard work for folks of taking a concentrated amount. And again, for those of you who are very much into the keto, you know, ketosis kind of thing or that whole philosophy, we're only talking a couple of grams of material per day, as I mentioned earlier. This isn't like, you know, half of your diet uh, you know, being thrown off because you're committing all of these polysaccharides. We're only talking a few hundred milligrams to maybe a few grams per day of this material. So I just for me, like I just view as of course dietary supplements are, they are supplemental to the diet, right? Like we still can't supplement our way to good health. We still have to eat well, whatever that means. But being able to supplement your diet with a few hundred milligrams to a few grams of this material every day, to me, no pun intended is a no-brainer, like really, based on all of our work and work from around the world.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, and in full full transparency, um, you the product now you sell is similar to what you studied, right? That that's why we're here talking about it. And so are there third any third-party uh replications of the work that exists or in flight, or and there, you know, is there any result that would change your mind about the whole thing?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great question. I mean, we so you know, again, if I had a lot of money, I would love to fund, take our formula, and then go to some other university that I have no affiliation, you know, no connection to, and just say, here, here's a million dollars, run this study, see what you get. I would love to do that. I mean, I in complete transparency, I don't have anything to gain from being, I mean, you know, that's that whole thing that happened was at the University of Minnesota where all that money was wasted basically on the amyloid uh hypothesis. I don't even know how I don't know if those people have been prosecuted yet, but if they haven't, they should have been because they've squandered so much money from NIH and probably Alzheimer's Association and all these others. So I don't have any, I don't have any, I mean, I could not, you know, we don't know each other other than just this conversation today, but I mean, that's not the way I was reared. I I'm uh I consider myself to be a very ethical person. I put my name on the label of our of our products. I am 100% transparent about what we're doing. You know, we third-party test our formulas. It's produced in a GMP facility, it's an FDA registered facility. I mean, we we try to do it the right way. You know, this wasn't having an idea in the shower one night and saying, wow, let's, you know, let's make a lot of money with this product. This is this is literally Rob, my life's work. I mean, I've I have put everything I can in my own, you know, in who I am as a person for almost the last 20 years of my life. This is this is my life's work. So I I challenge anybody to say, well, hey, John, what about this or that? But at the end of the day, this has still been my journey and and what I've discovered and what we've published in the scientific literature, and you know, just ultimately trying to help people. I mean, that's really what this is all about is at the end of the day, yeah, of course, we all have bills to pay and we need to make a living, but still being able to help people with this incredible tool that, you know, as you as we first started off the conversation, you know, polysaccharides 101, that's what I love doing what I do, because you have so many people out there talking about diets and protein and vitamin D and vitamin C and so many things that just are coming at you from so many different sources. I'm like the you know, the the little one guy that's talking about polysaccharides, like there's so few other people uh talking about this particular part of nutrition that again has such incredible potential benefit.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, in the in the lat we're in the last moments that remain, maybe you could talk a little bit about your company. Um, it's available in the US. Is it available worldwide? Is insurance cover it? Uh anything like that?

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. So it's the our company is called, as I mentioned, it's in my name. It's called Dr. Lewis Nutrition. Uh our flagship product is called Daily Brain Care. That's based on all of our work in Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis that I'd love to come back and talk to you with about that research as well. It's available. We've mostly focused on the United States market. It's uh, you know, it's difficult to just completely roll out globally, but we do work with quite a few people in several different Asian countries, Australia, a couple of countries in Europe, Canada. I mean, we're you know, slowly but surely trying to expand globally, but you can get our product on our website, drlewisnutrition.com. You can get it at Amazon if you like. I mean, we we're trying to again roll this out as much as we can. Of course, we're limited. We don't have a multimillion dollar budget to just you know throw everything we can at marketing, but slowly but surely we're building. And I I like to, if I can, at least contact one, if I can just touch one new life every day, to me, that's a victory. And so that's what I've been focused on, you know, baby steps, and hopefully we'll hit a point where it goes parabolic and we'll really take off. But it's, as you know, it's a struggle because of the brain health space. There's so much competition, so many people out there just throwing together formulas that have a lot of caffeine in them. Daily Brain Care has no caffeine. This isn't like, excuse me, a stimulant-based product at all. Again, this is a polysaccharide-based. It's not, you're not going to get a jolt from this. It'sn't, this isn't taking caffeine and you know, working off of a high for a few hours and then coming down. This is a completely different strategy. It's based on, again, all this research we've conducted over the last almost 20 years.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and we'll we'll put the link to in the show notes on how to find it. And I think there's a discount code also that if people want to order it after the show, they can get a discount, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Correct. Longevity 10, uh, longevity 10 will work on our website, drlewisnutrition.com. That will not work on Amazon, but I know that it's what, like 25-30% of all retail sales are now through Amazon. So we don't normally um, I mean, we have promotions on Amazon as well, but for our particular conversation, you can anybody that wants to order can use longevity 10 to get a 10% discount on their on their purchase.

SPEAKER_01:

Great. And I I definitely want to uh come back, uh have you back on the show and talk about the the work on multiple sclerosis, another neurodegenerative disease that uh these polysaccharides. Uh you you've you've done some amazing work on that. So we'll definitely have you back for that. And thanks thanks so much, John, for spending time with us today and and uh telling us about these these fascinating molecules.

SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate it. It's been such a great conversation. I I've really enjoyed my time with you.