Fragle Rok
Join Fragle as he and his friends explore, learn, and laugh. We cover health, history, psychology, philosophy, and more! Fragle traveled with the Grateful Dead for 10 years before moving to Taiwan to teach English. Now in Asia, he is bringing the past to the present by discussing social issues such as addiction, trauma, and mental health. Get ready to Laugh and learn baby, Let's go!
Fragle Rok
Stem Cells, Amino Acids, and Gut Health (Part 1)
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Join Fragle and his friend Andrew Nicholis, in Part 1 of a fascinating discussion on stem cells, amino acids, and protein. Andrew is currently a PhD candidate at University of Taipei Graduate School. He has a rich background in pilates and movement integration and focuses heavily on nutritional health and wellness, specifically protein and aging.
Their discussion starts with the origin of stem cells and their vital role in longevity and aging. Andrew offers a unique perspective on their commercialization in modern medicine and their relationship to adipose tissue.
This episode takes a deep dive into the body's efficient ways of recycling amino acids, with a particular focus on the vital role of protein. They examine how autophagy, a natural cleanup process, plays a key part in this recycling. Listeners will gain an appreciation for the complex interplay of genes, as 20,000 genes give rise to 400,000 proteins!
During the final segments, the discussion challenges conventional wisdom about fat and its role in tissue repair and highlights the benefits of maintaining healthy body fat levels.
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Stem Cell Biology and Longevity
Speaker 1All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Fraggle Rock Podcast. All right, how are we doing today?
Speaker 2I'm doing well, but you know, I've got to ask you where this fraggle thing comes from, Because I'm Australian and I mean that's two syllables. We're going to have to bring it down to frags. We can do that, All right.
Speaker 1I was at Jerry Garcia's birthday bash in West Virginia, once sleeping with my dreadlocks. I had dreadlocks at the time and this girl named Kat woke me up and I jumped out of the tent and my dreadlocks were sticking every which way and she's like you look like a fraggle rock. I'm like what the hell is that? She's like you don't know what that is. I'm like I've never heard of it. She's like that's your name and when you're traveling with a group, and so that just stuck and I've been going by that for like 20 years.
Speaker 2Oh, that's cool, that's cool, but I'm going to probably revert to frags because, you know, in Australia we have this habit of like shortening everything, putting a Y on the end.
Speaker 1Fraggy, is that what happened?
Speaker 2Yeah, it could be frags or fraggy People call me frags.
Speaker 1People call me frag. Yeah, it works it all works All right.
Speaker 2Well, nice to be here, Frank, Absolutely man. All right, so we're here to talk about essentially your focus for your thesis. Is that correct? Well, yeah, it's sort of the focus for my life, but I am doing a PhD and I'm coming to the end of the PhD in that, and that.
Speaker 2PhD here in Taiwan at the University of Taipei, under a very prominent professor. Of course, no one sort of knows professors unless you're in the field, right, and so people in the field, my professors, may be worldwide top 10. Wow, like on longevity, aging with exercise. So my PhD is in sports nutrition, but we're looking primarily at immunology uh, from the stem cells and the immune cells, because all cells in the body come from stem cells, and this is something we're going to talk about if we're talking about longevity, uh-huh. So um, every cell that has been built in your body and will be built in your body comes from a stem cell, and those stem cells all come from the bone marrow whoa as a living person.
Speaker 2As a an embryo the embryonic stem cells they came from your mother, but as an adult, once you're born, they all come from your bone, and bone's an essential part of healthy living and we're going to get into. Yeah, it gets complex, so what I want to be able to do is keep it for your listeners at a level where they're going. Okay, so that's what I can do, but it's nice to have a little bit of the science behind it 100%.
Speaker 1I already have like three questions. I'm very, very interested in stem cells. It's something I want to get in my life. I know fasting is one way to boost your stem cells, right, but they're very expensive.
Speaker 2Yeah well, you, one way to boost your stem cells, right, um, but they're very expensive. Yeah well, you know. Here's the thing, um, medicine and pharmaceutical industry, the western medicine model, has turned everything into into profitability, um, and you can go and buy stem cells so you can get them extracted from your generally, it's from your fat tissue, from your adipose tissue, because and this is a little known fact that adipose is basically a storage of stem cells. So when your body has excess nutrients and and calories are a nutrient, all right, nutrients, proteins, minerals, etc. Any excess of nutrients they don't want to store it somewhere because they're valuable from an evolutionary sense of, and so fat is a storage of stem cells like glycogen as well, right well, glycogen stored in the muscles, in the liver, that's valuable for survival.
Speaker 2Well, in in in evolution, we had famines and fasts, right, and so the reason why this whole fasting fraternity has taken off is because we're going back to these evolutionary sort of they're not instincts, but they're evolutionary patterns that we went through, and our evolution evolved to be able to mitigate the downsides. So when we had excess in the spring and in the summer and we consumed a lot, we stored a little bit of fat so that during the times where we had less, we could have those nutrients go back. Well, how is fat a nutrient? It's a stem cell, and every cell that grows in your body requires a stem cell to grow it.
Speaker 1So adipose tissue is fat, yes, and it's composed of stem cells.
Speaker 2Well, yeah, there are certain types of stem cells. They're called the mesenchymal stem cells. There's certain there's a number of lineages of stem cells.
Speaker 2They all come from a uh, a god particle all right, they all come from the same sort of uh stem cell lineage in the bone and then they differentiate what we call differentiate so they go down these lines, so we have these omnipotent they're actually called omnipotent stem cells, multipotent and then we bring them down to progenitor cells. So a progenitor cell is a stem cell that has already said I'm going to make a muscle, I'm going to make a neuron.
Speaker 2But, if we go back to that, to a multipotent cell which like, for example, I'm studying hematopoietic stem cells, which are the red blood cell ones, well, they produce all the immune cells, all of the structural tissues, so your fascia, your ligaments, your muscles, et cetera. Mesenchymal stem cells are part of that lineage. So it's like a family tree. When you look at, there's this god particle stem cell sitting here and then they differentiate and they, they differentiate, and they differentiate. And what? What's very interesting to know, and this is very important for longevity is the immune cells, so all the white blood cells. So people have heard of leukocytes and lymphocytes and basophils and and so on and so forth no, I don't think people have okay.
Speaker 2So when? Well, if, if they go to the doctor and they get their blood report and they look at their blood report and they'll see white blood cell, they'll see all of these types of white blood cells in there, and these cells all come from the same lineage as your muscle comes from. So if you want to build an immune system, it's the same stem cell lineage as if you want to exercise and build muscle system, and this is one of the reasons why exercise helps you live longer. Appropriate exercise and we're going to talk about that today, I believe is is that when we do the right type of exercise, the right volume of exercise, based on our age, our gender, our location, etc. Etc. We can stimulate the system that goes back to the bone that creates the cyclical propagation of stem cells into the environment, which will then enhance your immune system. It's very interesting because there are a lot of feedback mechanisms. I think we'll unwind it as we go through today.
Speaker 1Sweet Right on. All right. Questions are building. Do you have? A place where you want to start. The stem cells are fascinating. I want to know a lot about those look um, I didn't know they all come from your bone marrow yeah, they all come from bone marrow.
Speaker 2So what's really interesting is well, let's start with bone. So we basically have bone which is hollow and then we have bone which is not hollow. So the hollow bone uh is the one are the ones that produce stem cells inside. So you were a carnivore diet person for a while right. So what do you do? You break open the bone and what's in there? It's the marrow. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2Right. So why is the marrow? So, when a carnivore which has different teeth than you, by the way kills an animal and it breaks open the bone, the first thing it does it goes for the organs first, because they're enzymatically rich immediately.
Speaker 1Enzymatically meaning what?
Speaker 2They've got enzymes in them. So, like all the enzymes which are breaking down things like proteases to break down protein, lipases to break down fats different types of enzymes that will break down different types of tissue. Okay, so the liver is the fullest of those, so generally a carnivorous animal will just go straight into the gut and eat the liver. Right like wolves right Right wolves and the cats, and the meat's the last thing they eat, because the meat's the least nutritious. Yeah.
Speaker 2Right, then what do they do is they take the bones and then they break open the bones and they suck the marrow from the bone, which has become an idiom. So marrow is basically the production house of all of the stem cells in your body red blood cells, white blood cells and these progenitor stem cells that then go into circulation, and this is what's very interesting. There's a whole circulatory system, a whole vascular system, blood vessels that go in through the bone, and you think, no, no, no, like bones thick and solid. Right, it was like no, no, it's got arteries that go into it.
Speaker 1Wow, All the way to the hollow part.
Speaker 2All the way to the hollow part to transport these nutrients, and what we're finding is very quickly and we can't really tell because it's unethical to do this on humans but probably within minutes, if not hours, the stem cells that are in the bone are in your muscle tissue. Now, what we do know is that the circulation in the blood circulatory system so they're circulating around the blood can be in the muscle that you're exercising almost immediately, and so one of the interesting things that we're seeing is that muscle damage and muscle repair is happening while you're exercising.
Speaker 1Interesting.
Speaker 2And that is governed by the other lineage of these cells, which are the immune cells, so the white blood cells. So we have an immune system that goes in to do the cleanup. And so I mentioned this because most of your listeners and yourself have heard of this autophagy or autophagy, depending how you want to. Auto meaning self, phago, meaning to eat. So self-eating is something that the body does as a cleanup mechanism. Right Now, keep in mind that the body, from an evolutionary perspective and for those of you who don't believe in evolution, that's okay, we can call this by design, and those of you who don't believe in a divine design, we can call it evolution, but it's the same thing.
Efficiency and Recycling of Amino Acids
Speaker 2we have a system that runs this human being and this system is incredibly efficient and we might get to a discussion on protein one of these days, because everyone's big on you know how many kilograms of protein they want to eat. Because it's getting up into like it used to be grams and now it's like, yeah well, 200 grams, 300 grams, as soon as it's going to be like kilograms, because you know, I mean, you got to make money somewhere, right? The body is extraordinarily efficient with amino acids. Doesn't waste them, it recycles them, otherwise your poop would be highly rich in amino acids. It doesn't waste them, it recycles them, otherwise your poop would be highly rich in amino acids, but your body manages to extract most of them rather than waste them.
Speaker 2It doesn't waste them because they're so valuable and there's an aspect of efficiency. So the more efficient your body is at recycling, the less it needs to eat. And this is what the fasting principles and autophagy have been able to build for people is they've been able to go. Well, if I fast, I'm telling my system be more efficient and so it recycles better. Just like in a country, right like here in Taiwan. They're very good at collecting their recycling and what they do with it, we're not really sure, but they're very good at collecting their recycling. And what they do with it, we're not really sure, but they're very good at collecting pretty much everything, Except there are some pieces of plastic. They just say, no, we don't take those, and it's like, but it's plastic. I said, yeah, but it fits out of their recycling principles. Well, in some other countries maybe, they take those pieces of plastic. The more efficient you are, the more you can recycle this body is immensely intelligent.
Speaker 1I mixed up something autophagy and apoptosis, which liz corrected me on. I did a podcast on that, about how fasting increases the level of autophagy in your body is that right but it's occurring every day, all the time yeah so autophagy is the process of removing what so.
Speaker 2So let's just define that to make sure it's clear, because apoptosis is programmed cell death, so every cell has a program to die. We believe it has a program to die.
Speaker 1This is the current theory Like a life expectancy.
Speaker 2In a way, it's just like it's being timestamped to say that you're going to die Now, whether that is genetically timestamped or whether that is based on its function within the environment, my professor would be much more in line with it's a function of its, of its function in the environment, as opposed to a telomere running out he, he's not big on the telomere side of things where it's like, well, you can it we'll have to save that for a whole another thing, yeah yeah yeah so, so, um, apoptosis is where a cell is basically uh, uh, commits suicide okay so when we go into autophagy, autophagy is the is the body's cleanup mechanisms, that's all.
Speaker 2It's just. It's a fancy word, for I gotta recycle, I to recycle, I've got to clean up.
Speaker 1And what is it cleaning up? Dead cells, dead tissue, dead proteins, dead bacteria, cells, everything Cells, yes.
Speaker 2Protein. Well, bacteria, everything's protein. Basically every cell that you have is made with protein and fats. They're called lipoproteins.
Speaker 1Uh-huh.
Speaker 2Right, there is no cells in your body that are not made with protein. Okay. That you make Right and the whole thing about genes is genes are codes to make proteins. Uh-huh. So we have 20,000 genes. We make 400,000 proteins. Mm 400,000. In how long. Out of the base 20 amino acids. No in our body Like. If you need a protein like, okay, well, we need keratin for our hair. Okay, turn on the keratin protein. Wow.
Speaker 2And it starts spitting out this. The DNA starts spitting out this. Maybe, for example, a big protein may have 50,000 amino acids in it and a small one may have 30 or 40.
Speaker 1Whoa 50,000?. Amino acids Amino acids to compose one protein, for example, yeah, wow.
Speaker 2So the bigger proteins I'm trying to remember what that is that had 50,000 amino acids in it. It's just, it's insane. Look, think of this body. And here's a really good analogy Think of a small city.
Speaker 2So, within a small city, you have the buildings in the city and you have the roads and you have the pavements and you have the parks, but then underground you have the sewerage system and the water pipes and the electrical cables. You don't see those things, but the town planners that built this city knew every little detail of what needed to be built so that you can walk along the pavement and go to your favorite coffee shop and get your coffee and you have no idea about all the structures underneath your foot and above your head and beside you to get to there. Well, the body's like that, and so when it needed a paving brick, it turned on the make paving brick gene. When it needed an electrical cable under the ground, it turned on the electrical cable making. So we have, like I said, we have 20,000 genes. We can make 400 plus thousand proteins. Wow.
Speaker 2And your body is basically a protein manufacturing, and this is why protein is the most important nutrient. The most important nutrient that we get from our diet are amino acids which you can get enough just based on a vegan diet oh yeah, well, you can get it, you can.
Speaker 2You can actually get enough on a very, very limited diet, even like a fruitarian diet for some people, and that is because your microbiome, or those gut bacteria, they produce protein. See, protein is basically, if you took a carbohydrate, which is a carbon hydrogen oxygen, so, for example, sugar carbon, hydrogen oxygen, yeah so, for example, glucose, that the the base one is c6, h12, o6 right six carbon, six oxygen, 12 hydrogen.
Speaker 2Well you, you throw a nitrogen on the end of that, you have a protein you throw a nitrogen on the end of a glucose and you get a protein yeah, now obviously the structure's got to be right.
The Gut Microbiome and Cellular Recycling
Speaker 2Right, okay, but basically an amino acid or a protein is a nitrogen compound fixed to a carbon glucose chain wow, okay and so when we eat protein, basically what the body does is it breaks the nitrogen off and this is this is called deamination. So amine is the, is the amino acid there are other processes is deamination is it gets complex, but but basically your body breaks off those nitrogen and combines it in other areas. Well, our atmosphere is 79% nitrogen right Right.
Speaker 2We're not lacking in nitrogen. What we need is nitrogen fixing. And so in the soil, in healthy farms, what do they do? They have nitrogen fixing bacteria. Hello, well, our gut has all of these things as well.
Speaker 2Our gut has over probably 2,000 species of bacteria. There are more gut bacteria, or equivalent gut bacteria, to a number of cells in your body. You have 40 trillion cells. You have 40 trillion gut bacteria. Well, total bacteria in the body, most of them are in the gut. I'm talking 10 to the power of 13 in your gut, in your large intestine, in your large intestine. Your small intestine is only 10 to the 12th and in your stomach it's only 10 to the 10th. So you have a log level. You have 1,000 more fold bacteria in your large intestine and they're fermenters and they need fiber, and this is why we need to eat plants, no matter what diet you have. Like, all carnivores eat plants. Hello, cats chew on grass. So if you think you can just chew on an animal product and call yourself 100 carnivore, you're going to be in for a very nasty surprise down the line you say that because your gut biome needs the plants yeah, the bacteria needs fiber, it needs cellulose.
Speaker 1Among most other things, it's cellulose which is the okay, so the gut biome needs fiber, and fiber provides cellulose yeah, so fiber is cellulose, so it is so.
Speaker 2Your bone, your skeleton is the structure, and it's made primarily of calcium and magnesium and so on, right. Okay.
Speaker 1Your bones are made of calcium and magnesium.
Speaker 2And other things, but primarily right, okay, proteins, a lot of proteins in your bones. Your bones are full of proteins. Hydroxyapatite is a protein, so you hear of all of the I'm sure your listeners will have heard of all these things. Well, my teeth need hydroxyapatite, so it's in my expensive toothpaste with fluoride which is killing my microbiome, and I'm putting that on my teeth so that my teeth get stronger and it binds the fluoride into the teeth. Yes, it does, but that's not the natural way that. Hydroxyapatite it's another protein. These are all proteins. Collagen is a protein.
Speaker 2So you know, proteins are all over the place. Cellulose is the skeleton of a plant. Okay.
Speaker 2So where it stores its minerals, such as calcium and magnesium and zinc and such, are primarily in its cellulose. But they're trapped and we can't digest it. We don't have the digestive system in our enzymes to break it down. But we do have the microbiome, the gut bacteria, not just bacteria. There are five main families. Let's just call them the microbiome at the moment, fungi included. Right, they break down dead tissue. So if you go into a forest and the tree's standing there, there's no fungi on it, right, there's no mushrooms, but generally there's not. As soon as the tree falls over and it's no longer connected to the ground, it starts decomposing. And what decomposes? It Yeasts, fungi, bacteria and within a few years you've got this beautiful topsoil. Well, that's what the gut bacteria do. They break down dead tissue that we eat and dead tissue that is being sheared off from our gut lining. So here's another thing. So 25% of your feces are your own body 20% 25% A quarter of your feces are your own body.
Speaker 220% 25% A quarter of your feces are your own body, meaning what? So your intestines go from your mouth to your anus? All right, how long is that? Do you know?
Speaker 1I've heard the number before, but I forgot.
Speaker 2All right, somewhere between five to seven meters depends on whose textbooks you read, but it's generally considered. Your torso length will be three to five times your torso length. Okay.
Speaker 2So even if we just say it's 10 foot, all right, three meters, it's a garden hose. Now think of the surface area of the inside of a garden hose that's 10 foot three meters long and think about that every 24 to 48 hours, that whole surface surface area of the inside of a garden hose that's 10 foot 3 meters long, and think about that every 24 to 48 hours, that whole surface sheds like a snake skin. Well, those cells that are shedding like the snake skin are protein and lipoproteins. They're your cells and they go into your digestive system. So I'm not really vegan. I'm eating myself all the time. So I am a liar, right, I eat meat, I eat myself. So 25% of what's in my gut are actually my own cells.
Speaker 2So the process of autophagy, where we're cleaning up all those waste products, cells so the process of autophagy, where we're cleaning up all those waste products, it all gets dumped back into the intestines via the liver. That's why the liver is the detox organ. So the liver goes back and dumps it all back in through the gall and the liver enzymes. The gallbladder puts it into the small intestine and it goes back through the digestive system. So we're recycling and the liver does that 17 times a meal every five hours. It's insane. It recycles your whole blood system 17 times the whole food system that you eat. You think it goes like gut intestine blood muscle. No, it doesn't. It goes gut intestine blood back to liver, back to intestines, and it's recycling around and around, and around and around and around.
Speaker 1Filtering.
Speaker 2It's filtering and recycling and repositioning, because the liver is not a big storage place. It has 500 different things that it does. Uh-huh. Right, and this is important because your mic needs Viagra, man. It's like it keeps sinking. So I know I'm not that handsome, but yeah, that all right that that should do it. I'll let me let me nestle up, obviously. Obviously you've had. You've had a few young ladies in here and I'm just not doing it for your mic.
Speaker 2So what? What we have here is this whole recycling system autophagy that goes around, collects all of the waste products and takes it back to the central processing unit, just like those trucks that are taking your rubbish back to the central processing. Well, that's the liver. And why is it important that we have good liver health? Because it's central processing facility for every dead cell in your body. So every bit of poop that goes out the liver has basically put its stamp on it.
Speaker 1With dead cells.
Speaker 2Well with processing those dead cells. So what it does, it goes. Hey, that cell's high in this amino acid. We're a little low on this diet because this guy's off doing a juice fast. It's like okay, well, until the bacteria can help produce more of those amino acids, I'll just take it out of the dead cells. So when we have a good autophagy system this is why people can fast for weeks and weeks and weeks and and can still stand up at the end of it you don't lose muscle. It takes absolutely minimum of seven days until you lose muscle protein.
Speaker 1I asked Liz this because I was like I was doing fasting but I was putting like beetroot powder, ginger powder and a bunch of other stuff and then I was like I would throw some collagen peptides and a little protein powder in there as well.
Speaker 2It actually reverses the benefits that you're getting, because what you're doing is you're saying to the body okay, I need you to be really efficient or I accept these things. Seven days or less. You will not lose muscle protein or collagen from existing robust tissues, now tissues that are apoptotic, that are senescent. So this is what we're going to say senescent.
Speaker 1And this is something.
Speaker 2If we talk about longevity, senescence is the key word. So senescence means that it has a death signal, it has an aging process, it's going through some sort of degradation, all right. So senescence there are programs in a cell that turn on the senescence programs. These senescent programs release little chemicals into the environment that call the immune system in to take it away. That's autophagy.
Speaker 1Okay, like a hearse.
Speaker 2In a sense it's like a hearse Bring out the dead, Bring out the dead.
Speaker 2I'm not dead yet, boom, bring out the dead. Yeah, basically so this is what happens, and this is why exercise is I'm not dead yet, boom, bring out the dead. Yeah, basically so this is what happens, and this is why exercise is extraordinarily important, because exercise is a Darwinian fitness challenge that says are you tough enough to hang around in this body and like, their cell gets damaged, and it's not. So it then goes into the senescent cycle and gets cleared. This is actually what we're studying in my PhD. I'm studying it for 60 to 75-year-old women and we're looking at whether, for example, we have a supplement that has a ginsenoid in it. So it's not ginseng, but it has a ginsenoid in it, which helps to In young men. We've found what it does is it helps to potentiate the immune system, to remove the dead and dying cells.
Speaker 1Really.
Speaker 2It's insane.
Speaker 1Any ginseng or specific ginseng.
Speaker 2No, no, no this is a specific product that we're testing. Oh, and it's insane Like it changes performance. I mean, the technical name is it's RG1. Rg1. And I'm not going to plug the company that does it, because they sponsor the research until our research is published. You know we're not allowed to divulge that information, but the research that we have done with that product shows that it increases time to fatigue by 16 percent wow that's a long time wow, I take ginseng pretty often, but this is specific, so the problem with ginseng is is that it's not um standardized
Speaker 2so if it's growing in the cold mountains of, of you know, the qinghai mountains in china, is going to be very different than it's grown in a laboratory down in taijong uh-huh, uh-huh so you know again, these are the environmental inputs that make ginseng tough yeah so in the same way, the environmental inputs that we put in our body make it tough, kills the weak cells right and they get chewed up and taken away and recycled and put back out as fertilizer.
Speaker 2It did like you know, all native cultures did this right. They all pooped and peed as part of their fertilizer process. They didn't have sewage systems to run it all away. They had it into the gardens. And here's what's very interesting is that the gardens with the poop and the pee of the inhabitants there have a specific microbiome that is matched to the microbiome of the contributors of the feces in the urine.
Speaker 1Isn't that how you get dysentery though?
Speaker 2Oh yeah, it is. It is when you live out of harmony with nature, which is what large communities do, and this is a good segue into what large communities so when we're talking about longevity, for example, one of the things that if people don't like to hear this, but small people live longer.
Speaker 1I know this. I don't remember where I learned it, but there was a recent discovery, maybe.
Speaker 2I was watching documentaries about bodybuilders and it's like the bigger you are, less you live, so you die when I was doing my proposal exam, because, uh, I wanted to take this concept and let the my examiners know about this. I'm like, okay, were there any hundred year olds over seven foot five? You know any other? No, there were two that like got into their 70s and 80s, most of them known in the world above 7'5", didn't make 50 years old. Wow.
Diet, Growth, and Longevity
Speaker 2So if you go and you look up Robert Wadlow I mean, he died, at what 28. You look up at all of these super tall people above 8'0" they live maybe 30. And the reason why is there are so many cells to take care of the proportion of cells to bone, so the bone can only produce so many stem cells and they've got to look after the cell. So if you think about, you're in a small village and you have 50 people and everything's good, right, you know, we got just enough food for our 50 people and da-da-da-da. But then what happens is you get some immigrants come in from the next door village that burnt down and now you've got 80 people but you've still only got the resources of 50 people. So now you're taxed, so now you have to go out and cut down some extra trees and build some more houses and you start using these resources in a non-sustainable manner. Well, this is what happens when people get bigger.
Speaker 1And some people, naturally, are bigger.
Speaker 2So there's two types of bigger. There is the genetic bigger and then there is the growth bigger.
Speaker 1Like fat or muscle.
Speaker 2Yeah, and height, like, for example, the Chinese. Now are taller on average than they were 10 and 20 and 30 years ago because they're eating more protein. Wow. It's directly related to protein. Protein is a growth stimulant.
Speaker 1Meat protein.
Speaker 2No protein, full stop protein. Now meat protein is more than plant protein, but all protein is protein. So we have 20 amino acids and if I took the amino acid, let's say arginine, out of a plant, and I took it out of meat and I put it down, it's the same thing. It's exactly the same thing. You couldn't differentiate it unless you were DNA testing anything that maybe was still connected to it.
Speaker 1So we're talking about the 20, you said 20 amino acids like branched-chained amino acids, so branched-chain amino acids.
Speaker 2So branched-chain are three of the ones that are in the essential. So you have leucine, isoleucine and Valine. Yeah, valine, I can't remember. I don't try to remember all of them because they just keep going in and out, so the primary one is leucine. Leucine is the primary growth stimulant, amino acid-. Really. Which is very high in whey protein, which is why whey protein is the preferred protein for bodybuilders. Uh-huh Meat is also high in methionine, which is another.
Speaker 1Actually, what's very interesting is in the body Methionine is an amino acid.
Speaker 2Yes, Okay, yes, so we have nine essential amino acids, the essential ones we need to eat, and then the other 11 of them we make. And there may only be eight, some people need to eat nine, some people only need to eat eight. There is some genetic variation within people.
Speaker 2Some people only need to eat seven, but let's just say nine the commonly accepted, and so you need to eat these essential amino acids, and all foods have except collagen, which is short of one. All foods have all amino acids, all essential amino acids, in, but they're in a proportion. So, for example, if you eat rice, brown rice, for example, it has all nine essential amino acids but a couple of them for short of what you would need if that's all you ate. So if all you ate all day, for all of your energy needs, was brown rice, you'd be short on a couple of amino acids.
Speaker 1Methionine is one of them is that where they say rice and beans as a full amino acid? Exactly so it's the profile.
Speaker 2But it's not that rice doesn't have the amino acid. It's just that if it was your only source of food, yeah which is ridiculous, because this is how they did the study. They did the study goes back like a century ago. They took an egg and they said, oh, egg's the perfect protein, because a whole chicken can grow from this little thing. So then they set that as the standard for the perfect protein, and then they matched everything against it. Really.
Speaker 2And so they went. Oh look, meat is higher in all of these than eggs and lower in these, so this is a complete protein. Well, look at this rice. It's short in these two compared to eggs, so it's an incomplete protein, which is hogwash, wouldn't it depend on the egg and also how the egg was cooked. No, no, the proteins will still be there. Really, your availability of those amino acids may be different based on how it's cooked, but the amino acid contents is within the egg. It's a sealed container.
Speaker 1Interesting. My buddy said eating raw egg yolk is more nutritious than cooked egg yolk. But to get the full protein out of an egg white it's better if it's cooked. I don't know if that's true.
Speaker 2So the problem with the egg white is that you can't absorb the protein in the way that it's bound, so cooking it frees it up. It's the same with beans. Don't eat raw beans, right? You either need to sprout them or you need to cook them because, there are agents in there to protect the bean from being eaten.
Speaker 2And this is the whole thing of you know your Dr Gundry's going. It's like these beans will kill you, unless of course you buy a supplement and eat it as well with the beans. But then if he just cooked them he wouldn't make any money, would he? So you know the complexity of digestion and I think that if you want to give a single simple message is it's so complex that we can't apply our brain to every part of it.
Speaker 2Nature sort of pretty much worked it out and over many, many millennia humans worked it out so like, for example, the indigenous Americans they used to to the corn. If you just eat corn then it doesn't allow you to get the B vitamin into it. So they do a process called niximatization or niximalization, where they treat it with an alkaline to release that. They just work that out. You know the Chinese and the Koreans and the Germans take their cabbage and they ferment it so it increases the probiotics. They work that out. So you know animals have worked that out as well. We've all worked that out. The problem is that we've mechanized, we've removed ourselves from the natural processes, but we're sort of diverging.
Speaker 1So let's stay on the amino acid. Yeah, we were talking about Chinese people and how they ate protein, and now they're taller.
Speaker 2Yeah, they're bigger. I mean every culture that moves from a third to a second to a first world sort of economy. The people get bigger and taller.
Speaker 1And the lifespan gets shorter.
Speaker 2Well, not necessarily because we have better medical practices now.
Speaker 2So you talk about cholera and dysentery, right? Well, we have very good antibiotics to treat those things and antibiotics have basically doubled the lifespan, and that infection was very much because of the growing community outweighed the resources that were available to it. Where you go into the Amazon and you find these tribes that have been living there for 2000 years, they're fine, they don't have antibiotics. Well, you go into the Amazon and you find these tribes that have been living there for 2,000 years, they're fine, they don't have antibiotics. Well, they do. They have tree leaves and roots and barks and all of these medicines that they use to take care of themselves, but they're living in harmony with nature. We just don't do that anymore.
Speaker 1And before the Chinese people you were telling me about, nobody over seven foot tall has lived past Seven, five if I remember correctly.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean there are a few seven footers that had lived into their 80s and 90s that were well known. Obviously, you know this is a generalization, but you'll see. For example, basketballers don't, on average, the seven foot and above basketballers don't live to the average age. On average, they don't live to the average age. They die earlier. Bodybuilders are the same and so it was very interesting. I had a conversation with a new master student who's coming in and he's a bodybuilder. He's a competitive bodybuilder and he's one of the better ones in Taiwan. He's a certified nutritionist.
Speaker 2He's coming to his masters in sports nutrition. It's like he switched on. He's a nice guy and he's like so you know? He's like yeah, well, I put on muscle because I want to live longer.
Speaker 3And I'm like no, he's like no, no, no, no yeah, the stronger you are, the longer you live.
Speaker 2And I'm like that's not what he said. The stronger you are, the longer you live. Yeah, that's what the data shows that the more strength you have as you get into your older years, the longer you live. Strength, not muscle, and he's like it's different. I'm like, yeah, so strength stops you falling over. Strength means you can hold on to the handrail when you're walking down the stairs.
Speaker 1Like mobility and balance.
Speaker 2Mobility and balance and circulation and stimulation into the bone marrow, et cetera. So in America, where we get a lot of the stats over 80 years old, okay, so if you take an average American over 80 years old in one year, 50% of them will have a fall.
Speaker 1You take an average American over the age of 80.
Speaker 2So my mom's 82.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2Right. If she was American, she would fall. She has a 50% chance of falling in the next year. Wow. And of those that fall, 50% don't live another year. Whoa, so that's a 25% mortality rate every year from falling once you hit 80% I'm going to repeat that 25% mortality risk Once you're 80 years old in America from falling over. How do you prevent falls? You stay strong, you stay agile, you keep all of these faculties of the body functioning. You don't build bigger muscles, you get stronger.
Speaker 1But if you have stronger muscles, wouldn't those protect you in a fall? Not that you need like gargantuan muscles.
Speaker 2Hang on you used the word stronger, but now you're talking bigger. So you've made the same confusion that my bodybuilding.
Speaker 1I understand what you said, though Strength and muscle are different things.
Speaker 2Right. So like, for example, strength, hold on muscle are different things, right, so like for example strength hold on.
Speaker 1Well, let me point out what I was saying which you brought up a really good point about mobility and balance being signs of strength and how, if you have that and that's good, that's going to prevent you from falling over you're generally going to be more stable it doesn't prevent, as in 100 when I went home I observed my parents and other people and I remember squeezing my dad's arm and I was like whoa, there used to be like muscle tissue here, and now there's not.
Speaker 1And it made. The first thought that came to my head was what if they fall over? Like just one time, yeah, and like there's nothing protecting their bones or their joints, and so I feel like that would cause injury.
Speaker 2Yep, yeah, bones or their joints, and so I feel like that would cause injury. Yep, yeah. So this is very good because we have to balance the ability of your bones to maintain all cells, including muscles, and the requirements for strength and, shall we say, padding okay, padding, yeah all right. So the first thing is is that, and so there's a very good study and I'm not sure, maybe you can put this up on on your youtube later I can yeah um.
Speaker 2So this study um I'm gonna read the title of the study uh is a study my professor did. Um, because some of your listeners may want to find it. Maybe you can put it in the notes. Sure.
Speaker 2Okay, and this is really important on exactly what we're talking to. So let me just call it up. It's called Whole Life Body Composition, trajectory and Longevity. The Role of Insulin. Whole Life Body Composition, trajectory and L and longevity colon, colon, dot, dot, the role of insulin and the PMID number. So if you just type in Google, you just put PMID and you put this number, 337-44-845, it'll bring that article up and you can read it.
Speaker 2And there's some very, very interesting graphs in there. And so what he did and these are my studies, but they've seen the same in all organisms, pretty much all organisms. There are a few exceptions and we can talk about those like whales and Arctic sharks, but the bigger the organism, the shorter it lives In general. What happens is this so they took mice and these mice normally live for about two years and they weren't experimented on, so they didn't inject them with anything, they didn't do anything nasty to them, they just loved them and treated them and fed them and exercised them like as good as a laboratory mice can ever live. It's like they got the lucky draw right.
Speaker 2And then they measured them. They dexascanned them so they could measure their bones and their skeletons and they basically measured them every quarter of their life and then they mapped out their body weight at birth, their body weight at the equivalent of what you would be at 20, 40, 60 and 80. So over that time span and they all got fed ad libitum, which means they could eat whatever they wanted they put the rat chow in the cage and they could eat. So there was no like controlled feeding Everyone ate what they wanted, drank what they wanted, did all their little rat mice thingies as they wanted right.
Speaker 2They were free to live, and so what they found is the ones that grew the fastest died the earliest and the ones that grew the slowest lived the longest without fail, and there were five groups and the graphs that we have on that paper you can see these five groups and if you actually are looking at this online, you'll see that the black line is the ones that grew faster and they all died after approximately 720 days, whereas the ones on the blue line, which were the smallest and slowest growing, and they maintained their body weight throughout their life and towards the end of life, where they started to fall off, they lived 1,032 days. So they're living like 300 more in a year, longer than the others. Wow.
Speaker 2So the fast-growing ones died in two years, the slow-growing ones lived three years. So, it's very interesting. So he came and he did all the data crunching and the theory that came out of this and this is 2015, 2016, was that all cells require stem cells and bone stem cells to be able to maintain their mass. The bigger the mass where the bones don't get bigger.
Speaker 1You see, the bone mass wasn't bigger relative to their body bone size is limited and the bone size itself can never get larger.
Speaker 2It's very, very difficult, once you hit 20 years old, for your bones to to increase as a bodybuilder.
Speaker 1Your muscle tissue gets huge, but your bones don't get any larger now you go, or an obese now. You now exactly and your bones can't really support that exactly, and it does not provide enough stem cells.
Speaker 2Right for all that you burn them out, basically you you can exhaust them. Yeah, you exhaust them. It's called stem cell exhaustion, and that now you've just you nailed it there. So so my professor's thing is when you hit the age of 20, maintain that weight for as long as possible in your life until you get until you're later 70 or 80, and then try and put on a little bit of weight very slowly, because that weight, even if it's fat weight, will be reserves for the final months to year of life.
Speaker 1Are you saying it's better to have a consistent? Stable, weight than to have weight fluctuations.
Speaker 2Absolutely. So he's like what did you weigh when you were 20? And I'm like well, I weigh the same as I weigh right now. He says perfect.
Speaker 1Huh interesting.
Speaker 2Perfect. Now what does that mean from someone who was obese at 20? It's like, well, should they lose weight? Well, that's a very, very good question. Huh. Because losing weight is using resources. Where do you put that weight? So, in general, what we do know is that adiposity decreases lifespan because-.
Speaker 1Adiposity meaning having fat tissue, having fat tissue.
Speaker 2overweight decreases lifespan because you've got to keep maintaining. So here's the thing you know that fat around your belly and you think it's like, oh man, this is so stubborn. It's been here since like I was 18. No, it hasn't. It's constantly going in and out of circulation, in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out. You're exercising, you're doing what's called lipolysis, you're breaking down fat and it's going into, and then you're laying it back down, and it's this constant cycle.
Speaker 1You're burning it and regenerating it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2More than just burning it, you're using it. You're putting it into circulation, because you actually use it to rebuild cells. This whole concept of burning fat is a misnomer.
Speaker 1You said fat is composed of stem cells. Is that what you said earlier? No, or it's composed of what Adipose tissue? Adipose tissue, which is fat. It's made of stem cells.
Speaker 2It's a storage site for stem cells as well as just fat.
Speaker 1And every time you exercise, you're using those.
Functions of Fat in Cell Repair
Speaker 2You can, yes, and this is fascinating. So in another mice study and as a vegan I don't do any of the mice studies, but they've provided us with a lot of information. So what they did is they went in and they laser damaged the rat cell or the mouse cell, I can't remember which one it was and then they were watching what happened. And when they disabled fat from being able to go into the area, the cells didn't recover. The muscle tissue, the damaged tissue from the laser didn't recover. In the presence of fat, it recovered much more quickly and this allowed them to realize that adipose tissue, our fat storage, is actually there to recover, to repair tissue. So when you exercise here's the big thing you think you're burning fat, right, all right. So I've got to do this because this is fun. So how much fat do you burn from going for an hour's run?
Speaker 1I don't know, I don't even have a guess. You mean like, in terms of like weight.
Speaker 2Yeah, like how many grams of fat? Because everyone's like, well, good to do my cardio and burn fat it.
Speaker 1I did 20 minutes on the bike yesterday because I'm trying to stimulate losing fat. I put on weight. I went to America right, I gained like 5 kg.
Speaker 2Yeah, pretty quickly. I want to get a con. So here's the thing. Endurance exercise doesn't burn a lot of fat, so I went for a bike ride this morning. Clocked up about 40 miles, 60 kilometers, burned 1,400 calories. Okay 1,400 calories, Kcals, but let's just call them calories. Now let's say I could burn all of that from fat. So how many calories in a gram of fat Do you know?
Speaker 3I've read it, but I forgot. All right, nine, nine calories.
Speaker 2Approximately nine calories per gram of fat. So if we divide 1,400 by nine, then we're getting about 150 grams. Now if I was to say you could burn 150 grams of fat, man, you'd pay me a lot of money. That'd be really good. Because in a week that'd be a kilo Whoa 150 grams. Now that's assuming that all you burnt was fat, which you don't. At best, 60%. At best Depends on your intensity, depends on your metabolic efficiency. More than likely 25%. Wow.
Speaker 2So now my 150 grams of fat from my two and a half hours on the bike has gone down to about 30 grams Now. 30 grams of fat means I've got to do that every day, two and a half hours, 40 miles on the bike, to lose a kilo. It's like, oh, that's not a very good thing, is it? But, andrew, when we exercise we lose fat. Yeah, you don't burn it, you burn a very small amount of it. When you damage tissue, you have to repair the tissue.
Speaker 1The body calls fat reserves in to repair the tissue.
Speaker 2So that's where the fat's actually going Skin, actually going skinny, skinny, skinny. People don't repair as fast that makes sense, because they they don't. So you know you go. Let let's not talk about bodybuilders, because they're a very narrow band of of people to be down at seven percent body fat is really dangerous. It's actually it's very difficult to stay healthy.
Speaker 1What do you reckon you are?
Speaker 2I know.
Speaker 1You look pretty low.
Speaker 2So, on your standard in-body machine, I'm 10.9. On a DEXA scan, I'm 14.9. Okay. So on DEXA as much. It gets all the internal fat, the visceral fat, where the in-bodies don't. It gets all the internal fat, the visceral fat where the embodies don't. So in general a DEXA scan, you need to be below 15% to be considered healthy fat levels.
Speaker 1Okay, so what is it like?
Speaker 210% to 15% would be healthy, if you do caliper measures or any of the other measures, then I'd come in at somewhere around 10% to 11%. I've done all of those measures, even though I've got fat that I can feel and push around, but other bits of the tissue that I work out, but I'm not like lean lean Like I'm not the body type that would ever see a six-pack because, you need a certain muscle fiber type to see that as well.
Speaker 2But if you took those guys that you see, you know on the internet the YouTube guys that are like giving their youtube thing in in their naked body, sort of like, yeah, because they've like got to learn how to flex their abs as they're emphasizing their protein powders they're selling, so they can keep up their their podcast.
Speaker 2Um, those guys are sitting in seven, eight, nine percent fat. That's getting to a borderline dangerous. You start getting below seven percent. You start getting uh, danger of of not being able to recover, uh, and danger of infection. So generally a bodybuilder knows this. That's why bodybuilders in general don't stay at low body fat. It's a it's hard, it's hard to recover. So out of season they're going up to 15 20 body fat because they can put on muscle, because you need fat to build muscle, because it's a protein and a lipoprotein. So if you take a cell in your body, you know we think of this cell, right, you have this cell membrane and you have this cytoplasm inside. What is it? It's fat and protein.
Speaker 2It's all this what are fat and protein? It's all this Water, fat and protein. That's why, when you eat animal tissue which humans are animals you get cholesterol in the diet, because cholesterol is a type of lipoprotein. And you eat plants, there is no cholesterol because they don't make lipoproteins, they make cellulose. I'm not saying cholesterol is good or bad, I'm just saying that these are the structural differences. Right. Well, all of your cells require lipids and proteins to build, so everyone's like eating their protein. Right.
Speaker 2And now there is a much more awareness of the importance of fat. Right. But fat on the body helps us recover, so it it's really complex, like I've spent three years studying this phd and I'm just getting to the point where I'm like I know nothing, like I know nothing, like I thought I knew something you know. They always say the more you know, the more you know you don't know and it's like phd I think the acronym stands for permanent head damage because you realize.
Speaker 1You realize how dumb you are, like like I realize how dumb I am I've recently become a science teacher and I'm like, oh my god, you know, I'm constantly learning, every day yeah and realizing how little I know.
Speaker 2Yeah yeah, and and, and, really like, like. So I'm just publishing a paper on on a um, a regulatory factor in the muscle that tells the muscle to grow. They're called um, it's called myod, right, and and. Now like, if you, if you, if you go back five years, this was all the rage. It's like yeah, well, look at these four regulatory factors. Now the reviewers have gone. Yeah, but what about the micro rnas? Micro rnas oh, there's about 200 micro rnas that can can tell the body what to do. It's like it's just getting so, so complex. The average doctor has to learn 7 000 acronyms. Wow, in their training that's a whole language. If you learned 7 000 words Chinese, you'd be fluent.
Speaker 1Yeah, isn't 5,000 the requirement to be fluent? Yeah.
Speaker 2They're learning a whole new language of acronyms. It's like my first year in a PhD, just trying to learn all the acronyms.
Deep Dive Into Specialized Knowledge
Speaker 2It's like, can we just go back a bit? There's this FOXO gene, because my dumb, bloody farmer farmer mind goes fox, fox, right, yeah, fox. Well, the foxo gene is somehow related to one's height and longevity as well. So those with certain focus and it's like it gets so complex, did you get these professors that they just are so detailed in on the micro that they that, like children, they can't function in the world, but they know everything. So there's a joke. It's not really a joke, because you do a degree, you learn a little bit about a lot of things. You do a master's, you learn a fair amount about a few things. You do a PhD, you learn everything there is to do about absolutely nothing. So next question Thank you. So so Thank you.