More U Podcast
The More-U Podcast is all about how incredible individuals are helping others to get more of themselves and also how they built a business and brand for themselves in the process while still trying to stay human as good partners, spouses, parents and more. We will explore the world of medical aesthetics, plastic surgery, wellness, fitness, psychology and a whole lot more.
The show is hosted by Dr. Ben Caughlin, who is the leading cosmetic jaw surgeon in North America whose work has been described as nothing short of magic, but also a Tik Tok star that probably holds the record for publicly saying F*** more times than any other surgeon in history and Dominic Mazzone, Founder and CEO of MedSpa Partners, one of the largest and most successful consolidations of medical aesthetic clinics in North Americas and a serial entrepreneur with almost 19 businesses under his belt (some booming and some disasters).
Ben and Dom are able to extract the essence and nature from their guests, while also being vulnerable on how they're balancing being Type A titans during the day and humble dads and husbands at night. Learning, laughs, introspection and even a couple of fights!
More U Podcast
The Molecule That Could Change Your Health Forever | Dr. Nathan S. Bryan
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What if one molecule influenced your energy, blood flow, brain function, heart health, athletic performance, and even how you age?
In this episode of More U, Dom and Dr. Ben sit down with Nathan S. Bryan, one of the world's leading nitric oxide researchers, to explore why this overlooked molecule may be one of the biggest missing pieces in modern health.
Dr. Bryan explains how nitric oxide impacts cardiovascular health, metabolism, exercise performance, cognitive function, skin health, and longevity—and why common habits like using antiseptic mouthwash, consuming too much sugar, and certain medications may reduce your body's ability to produce it.
In this episode:
- What nitric oxide actually does
- Why nitric oxide declines with age
- Early warning signs of deficiency
- Foods and habits that hurt nitric oxide production
- Exercise, blood flow, and longevity
- Nitric oxide and sexual health
- The truth about supplements
- The future of nitric oxide in medicine
If you're interested in longevity, peak performance, or optimizing your health naturally, this is an episode you won't want to miss.
🎧 Subscribe to More U Podcast for conversations about health, performance, and becoming more aware.
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Website: ww.n1o1.com
Book: The Secret of Nitric Oxide
#MoreUPodcast
#NitricOxide
#Longevity
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#NathanBryan
For someone hearing about nitric oxide for the first time, why should they actually care about it? But the big ones are some drug theories like proton competitors. Privase the private sex, the nexium membersome and two personal. Those are very deadly drugs that completely hit the nitric oxide production. It can all be traced back to the loss of the production of a single molecule. Not a single molecule with nitric oxide.
SPEAKER_00You totally had my head spin. I'm microdosing nitroglycerin already. This is more you podcast. Here we are. Yeah, we're trying to, and I think uh Dr. Bryan, you you have uh the perfect uh antidote for us. Um it's more you it's trying to make people better. And I think you're really getting the word out there. I'm sure it's frustrating from your perspective because uh you're just explaining a complicated thing to everybody. So yeah, make them better.
SPEAKER_02By the way, I I love how Ben didn't even put that in a question. He just fired like we fired right out of the intro to Dr. Nathan Bryan and just went just boom. Like we're right, they're here to talk to him, they talk to us all the time. I think the problem is we were both really super pumped to talk to you because we we are just so interested in what you're doing, um, have a gazillion questions. And uh so our apologies. First of all, welcome to the show. We're we're we're really excited to have you.
SPEAKER_01Well, guys, great to be with you. Yeah, let's get to it, man.
SPEAKER_02Let's get to it. Yeah, yeah. You know, uh uh Dr. Ben's uh no BS.
SPEAKER_00Ain't nobody got time for this.
SPEAKER_02I just want to, if I can start, and by the way, do you want me to call you Dr. Bryant? Can I call you Nathan? Is that okay?
SPEAKER_01You can call me Nathan. I've been caught a lot worse, so you can't affect me.
SPEAKER_02Right, right on. Well, we'll try to see if we could top that today. We'll see if we can get the worst thing we'd call you there. But I think this is so interesting because I think there's a lot of people out there that have not heard of this, and also people some of that have heard about this, but for someone hearing about nitric oxide for the first time, what is and why, what is it like, and why should they actually care about it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, look, it's a good question, and you're right. Too few people know about this, so the people who think they know about it don't know the right science behind it.
SPEAKER_00But nitric oxide That's probably one of the big pieces. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's right. That's my frustration. Now, look, nitric oxide is a foundational molecule. It's naturally produced, you know, it regulates many, many important biological functions from blood flow and oxygen delivery and mobilizing our own stem cells and prevents our telomeres from getting shorter so we live longer. It regulates the mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles of the cell. So, what we're finding is when you lose the ability to produce this molecule, that's the earliest event in the onset and progression of age-related chronic disease, whether it's sexual dysfunction, uh easy fatigue, chronic fatigue, Alzheimer's, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, you name it, it can all be traced back to a loss of the production of a single molecule. That single molecule is nitric oxide.
SPEAKER_00You got my I was listening to some of the other podcasts you were on, uh Nathan, and you totally had my head spin, and I'm I'm microdosing nitroglycerin already. So I can't even go to that. Nobody do that. You're yeah, yeah, you're gonna get hurt. Don't do that. It's not medical advice, but you know, just thinking about some sort of a way to deliver it to because that's really one of the main problems, right? There's not a good way, there's not a good supplement or there's not a good therapeutic for this yet, other than for like, you know, acute angina, okay, but the it's complicated, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that's been the challenge for the past 40 years. I mean, every major pharmaceutical company out there has tried to develop nitric oxide drugs. But here's been the challenge because nitric oxide is a gas, it's produced. And once it's produced inside the body, it's gone in less than a second. About two milliseconds is an intravascular half-life. So the challenge is, and this is what we discovered more than about 25 years ago, because the question was if it's produced and it's gone in less than a second, where does it go? What does it become? And how does it signal? And until we can answer those questions, you really there was no way to develop safe and effective nitric oxide-based therapies. So, you know, the only approved approved clinical medicine is for premature babies with pulmonary hypertension. So they actually administer the gas. They have a gas cylinder of nitric oxide gas, and through a certain flow rate mixed with oxygen, they deliver that to the pulmonary uh vasculture, it dilates the pulmonary arteries, improves tissue oxygenation, turns blue babies into pink babies within seconds, and that's saved hundreds, probably millions of babies' lives over the past 40 years. But my challenge was, and really my objective was how do we deliver nitric oxide gas safely and effectively in an outpatient setting? Let's not wait till you're in critical care and you have a disease or you're in crisis. How do we deliver this and be proactive instead of reactive? And that's been my mission and objective for the past 30 years.
SPEAKER_00Well, and Nathan. But hold on, hold on. You don't have the answer yet, right? I mean, there's not a we don't have it yet. No, of course we do.
SPEAKER_01That's what I spent the past 15 years in developing. Once we understood when nitric oxide is produced, where does it go? What does it become and has a signal? Then I developed a technology that recapitulates nitric oxide production and signaling. But more importantly, we fix the reason your body can't make it. We focus on the function of the nitric oxide synthase enzyme. We focus on the microbiome, the bacteria that are responsible for the production of nitric oxide. So we can deliver therapeutic amounts of nitric oxide in an outpatient setting in a shelf-stable product, consumer product, and we're developing it as drug therapy, and we improve the body's ability to naturally make this molecule.
SPEAKER_02Okay, wow. That's there's your answer, Ben. Yeah, I missed the boat there. He's got it, we figured it out. That's why it's here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So we're done. Okay, let's get some of this product and let's go. We're more us now. We're more you.
SPEAKER_02I was super pumped. So, Nathan, um, a few questions on this. So, God, I don't even know where to start. You you described this as a miracle molecule, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, let me let me correct that. Miracle implies that you have an observation that you cannot explain by science. Twenty five years ago, all these things that we knew nitric oxide did but didn't have a scientific explanation or what we call a mechanism of action has been elucidated. So nitric oxide is no longer a miracle molecule. Everything that it does, everything that we know about it, we can explain mechanistically of whether it's affecting protein structure and function, activating enzymes, affecting the epigenetic expression of proteins and nuclear translation of those proteins. So it's not a miracle, it's it does miracle so-called miraculous things, but we can explain it.
SPEAKER_00So by definition, so it's a saint, it's it's a saint molecule then.
SPEAKER_01We call it a foundational molecule. Your body can will not heal without it. You can call it what you want, but it's foundational.
SPEAKER_02So when we when we're looking at this, like in your head, the the sorry, let me go back. I know what my I know how I'm gonna do this. Does does nitric oxide it declines with age?
SPEAKER_01It can, but doesn't necessarily mean that it does. Because here's what we're doing, if you look at clinical published study, and we what we do is they they take different people from age groups, say 20 to 30, 30 to 40, all the way up to 70 to 80, 80, 90 year olds, and they can infuse bradychine and acetylcholine in the coronary arteries, the brachial arteries, and then look at the resultant vasodilation. So what you're looking at is the function of the enzyme that responds to agonist. We call that endothelial function. So what those data tell you in the general population, not screened for anything, just your age, that you see about a 10 to 12% decline in endothelial nitric oxide production per decade. So by the time you're you know 60 or 70 years old, you have you know 80% less than someone from 20 to 30.
SPEAKER_00But that's can we test can you get that uh objective test relatively easily or is it complicated?
SPEAKER_01No, it's a very simple test. It's it's basically old technology, it's called venous occlusion plasmosography. But what happens is you can take a blood pressure cuff and you put it on your upper arm and you pump it up to super systolic levels, so you occlude all blood flow into the forearm and you do that for five minutes. And then with an ultrasound probe, you can look at the downstream vessels, and when you release the cuff, you look at how well and how quickly the blood vessels, the arterioles dilate. And if it dilates a lot, then it tells us making nitric oxide. If they don't dilate to the and get and cause what we call reactive hyperemia, then that tells us that those blood vessels, the endothyl cells in those blood vessels, aren't making any nitric oxide. It's a five-minute test. There are FDA-cleared medical devices that do this, but unfortunately, you know, most primary care docs don't know anything about it. Some functional integrative medicine docs will use it because they know the importance of vascular function in the early onset of cardiovascular disease or diabetes or sexual dysfunction.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so it redu it sounds like it reduces with age, sounds like 10% every decade. Did I catch that right? I think I caught that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but here's what we're finding. You know, you can accelerate it or decelerate it or completely stop it. So we've done tests on kids that are 20, 20 to 25 years old, and they have the vascular age of a 60-year-old because of their diet, because of their lifestyle. And then you've got people like me, I'm 52 chronologically, but I'm 29 biologically because we I know how to modulate this enzyme and I don't do the things that are disrupting nitric oxide production. So just because there's this published age-related decline in nitric oxide production, it doesn't have to be the case. We know how to prevent the age-related decline in nitric oxide production.
SPEAKER_02And and sorry, you were you used the word disruption, which I think is really important. What does disrupt nitric oxide production?
SPEAKER_01There are many things. A high sugar diet, anything that causes an increase in blood sugar. You know, sugars, sugar's the enemy. Because sugar, when it's when it's elevated in the blood, it and we call this glucose, it's the molecule that we measure. But glucose is glue, right? As the name implies, it's sticky. And if you ever spilled a soda water on the countertop, come back the next day, it's sticky. Well, it's sticky inside our blood vessels, it makes our blood vessels sticky. White blood cells, neutrophils, monocytes, platelet stick. It sticks to proteins like hemoglobin. We call that hemoglobin A1C, how much sugar is bound to hemoglobin. But it sticks to enzymes, and enzymes biochemically have to undergo transformational change to transfer electrons from one part to the other. And if it's glued together with glucose, it can't do that. So that's one anything that increases blood sugar. Number two is sedentary lifestyle. But the big ones are some drug therapies like proton pump inhibitors, the pralosecs, the crevicids, the nexium, omeprazol, pentoprazol. Those are very deadly drugs that completely inhibit nitric oxide production. And then the other big ones are cholesterol-lowing medications, uh, fluoride in drinking water, fluoride in toothpaste, anything that's labeled antiseptic that kills bacteria in and on the body, disrupt nitric oxide production.
SPEAKER_00You know, I had listened to you say the fluoride toothpaste thing the other day. I was just kind of researching things, and then I looked at my toothpaste jar, because you said the thing uh in one of them about like using a pea size, and I was like, of course I like really milk it on there. And then I read the back of the toothpaste thing tube and it said, you know, don't use over four weeks unless cleared by a physician or something. I was like, dude, I've been using this for like four years, you know, like it's crazy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Anything that that disrupts the and they put fluoride and toothpaste in the drinking water because it kills bacteria. Well, when you drink it, if you brush your teeth with it, if you bathe in it, you're killing the bacteria in your mouth, in your gut, on your skin, causing dysbiosis. And we know that every age related or chronic disease is associated with microbial dysbiosis. So we we have to target the microbiome and support the microbiome. We have 10 times more bacteria in and on the human body than we have human cells. And if we kill the good bacteria, we kill the host, the human host.
SPEAKER_02So I think it's important to understand that it sounds like you could have a low level of nitric oxide, but it presents as so many other things that you may not know that that is indeed the issue. Is that is that a fair statement?
SPEAKER_01No, that's correct. And you know, unfortunately, there's no way to clinically measure it in terms of blood lapse. You know, doctors don't want to treat things they can't measure. And that's a problem, right? Because everything that counts can't always be counted. And everything that counts don't always everything that can be counted don't always count. You know, it's like cholesterol. You want to treat cholesterol because you count it. Cholesterol has no meaning on cardiovascular disease. But they can measure it, they want to treat it, but you know, cardiovascular disease hasn't gotten better. It's been the number one killer of men and women worldwide for more than 100 years. Cholesterol, but that's what they do. So what we have to do is recognize symptoms. You know, for the past 25 years in basic science research, we can take blood and saliva and tissue biopsies and cerebral spinal fluid, and we can analyze it for different nitric oxide metabolites and get a pretty good clinical picture on that patient. But unfortunately, it's not used in clinical medicine. So what we rely on are symptoms, and there's a hierarchy of symptoms that start to develop as you progressively lose your nitric oxide production. Number one is sexual dysfunction, and it's in men and women. And if you think about it, it makes sense. If you can't dilate the blood vessels of the sex organs, you don't get an erection, whether it's a penile or clitoral erection. So that's the canary in the coal mine. It's the first indication that you have a nitric oxide. And then your blood pressure goes up. Because if you can't make nitric oxide to dilate the blood vessels, they become chronically constricted. Now you've got the same volume of blood going through smaller pipes. And going back to high school physics, pressure equals volume times resistance. If the volume of blood doesn't change, the resistance goes up, pressure goes up. And so nitric oxide addresses the physics of hypertension.
SPEAKER_02And then number three, you develop before you go to the next one. I think this is really important because there's going to be a bunch of guys out here listening that are taking like taken pills for sex and testosterone and all these things. Are you saying that in in some instances it just might be lower nitric oxide?
SPEAKER_01No, and in most of those instances, whether you and and look, and there's clinical data to corroborate that. The PD5 inhibitors, the rectile dysfunction drugs, were approved by the FDA in 1998. They've been on the market now for what is that, 28 years? They only work in 50% of the men. So 50% of the men, one out of two men who are prescribed Val or Cialis, whichever one you like, don't respond with better erections. 50% do not respond with better erections. Because the mechanism of action of these drugs is these drugs work downstream of nitric oxide. So if you're not, if your body's not making nitric oxide, there's no target for the PD5 inhibitors to work on. So these the men get no response. So this told us more than 25 years ago, erectile dysfunction is a symptom of nitric oxide deficiency. So PD5 inhibitors don't address it because they're not nitric oxide donating drugs. They potentiate nitric oxide signaling, but they don't affect nitric oxide production. So that's very, very important.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, I think this would be fascinating for people in the sense of they're they're they're told this is an issue, you're getting older, this is what's gonna happen. But it's like, no, no, no, we actually know why it's happening. We understand not only why it's happening, but we actually understand also how to solve for it. Is that that's is that fair?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And now we've got clinical data showing that you can take people who were non-responsive to the Viagra, cellus PD5 inhibitors, and give them a little nitric oxide to metaphorically and and physically prime the pump, now they become responsive. So this the entire mechanism is completely elucidating.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it makes sense.
SPEAKER_01If you can't make nitric oxide, these drugs don't work. If you improve nitric oxide production, the drugs work. So now you can titrate down the dose, make it safer. Or my goal is to address root costs where there's no need for drug therapy. You would tell you that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I think we should get into that because one, I'm curious myself. Two, I'm sure everybody's kind of wondering it what what is the what is the most effective you know thing to do? Is it is it lifestyle management, the the dysbiosis, the it's it's it's it's it's probably not as sexy as we want it to be. It's not just a pill and just everything's solved.
SPEAKER_01No, there is no magic bullet. There is no magic pill, there is no magic bullet. But look, let before we before we will address that, but we talked about ED, we talked about high blood pressure. Another, the next third thing that happens when you don't, if if these things happen and you don't improve it, then you develop insulin resistance and metabolic disease. 93% of Americans are metabolically unfit. Number four, you develop exercise intolerance, you get short of breath, you may develop some exertional anges. And then number five, you develop mild cognitive impairment, which eventually goes into dementia, which end stages Alzheimer's. There's your progression of nitric oxide deficiency, and your body is constantly talking to you. And if you don't listen, you end up getting sick and you die of horrible death. But you can all if you if so, then let's say how do we fix it? So I tell people the science is very complex, but the solution is really simple. So you got to stop doing the things that disrupt nitric oxide production and then start doing the things that activate it and stimulate it. And this is all predicated on diet and lifestyle. So stop eating sugar, simple carbohydrates. Uh, if you're using a fluoride toothpaste, stop. If you have fluoride in your drinking water, get a filtration system. If you're using mouthwash, you must stop. If you're using an antacid, you must wean off of these over a period of 20 to 30 days. You can't just stop these cold turkey. But now, once you've eliminated fluoride, sugar, antiseptic mouthwash, and an acids, now you've released the brakes on the body's ability to make nitric oxide naturally. You restore the normal flora, you release the brakes on the enzyme, and now moderate physical exercise, nasal breathing, and 20, 30 minutes of sunlight a day.
SPEAKER_00There's the recipe for good health. Okay. Dr. Brian, I have a problem. How the heck are you going to get rich on this? I wanted to make a pill that we could sell everybody. Well, look, that's what we because that's the problem.
SPEAKER_01That's why nobody's yeah. Yeah, no, but that was the problem. Again, nobody wants to take accountability. Nobody wants to stop eating a bad diet. Nobody wants to get their ass up in the morning and exercise and do the do the hard things that lead to good health. They want to take a pill. And pharma's conditioned us to there's a magic pill coming for everything. There is no magic pill. It will never happen. Nitric oxide is foundational, but it's not a panacea. It's not going to fix everything that's wrong with you. But here's what I'm confident in saying: your body cannot and will not heal or perform optimally without nitric oxide. So that's what I've done for the past 15 years is develop product technology based on the biochemistry, the enzymology, and the microbiome that recapitulates nitric oxide production and signaling and improves the body's ability to make it. So we have consumer products on the market. We've got a drug company called Brian Therapeutics. We're developing this for uh heart disease. Now you're talking. Now you're talking, my little neighbor. We make a topical drug for diabetic ulcers and non-healing wounds. But that's that's the future. Uh the future of medicine is dependent upon nitric oxide production, and we're leading the way. So stay tuned.
SPEAKER_00I think you know, honestly, I understand that you're saying you can measure it uh, you know, by checking the vascular response to ischemia. But it's so the the margin of error is big on that. Maybe with AI you can be more precise, but it it it would be you you said it already. We uh even myself, I like to see I can do 50 push-ups one day, the next time I want to see if I can do 52. So you want to people want something to track. And so I think if there was a test somehow that you could be really objective and clear and watch the trend, that's important in my mind.
SPEAKER_01Everybody has these wearable devices that look at heart rate variability, they can look at you know your sleep patterns, they can look at blood pressure, and and there's pulse wave analysis, non-oschemic plectosography that looks at you know the structure and function of blood vessels. But no matter what we use, and look, we we put everything that I do and bring to market, the clinically meaningful endpoint. I think that's very important. Whether it's blood pressure, if you've got an elevation in blood pressure, you get baseline data, you take the lozen 20 minutes later, you see your blood pressure come down. We can do time trials on exercise performance, get baseline, do a time trial, take the nitric oxide, repeat the time trial, you improve on time trials. And if you look at mobilization of stem cells, we measure stem cells in circulation before and after the lozage. Uh, we look at renal function, we look at ejection fraction, we look at um, you know, blood oxygen saturation, ventilation to perfusion, we look at doing it right heart cast, left heart cast, looking at coronary flow. Everything that's clinically meaningful in terms of endpoints, we've measured it before and after our nitric oxide to make sure that it works in every single person, that number one, it's safe, but number two, it's effective, it's bioactive. And if we give it, it does what nitric oxide does.
SPEAKER_02That's it's okay. So I'm gonna just tell you like Ben and I are overachievers. So as soon as we hear about something that could take us for so I don't eat sugar, I work out hard, I I have a filtration system. Uh the the fluoride thing I gotta look at.
SPEAKER_00So so hands up on that is that in in most filtration systems, would it would it filter out fluoride or do you have to have a specific one?
SPEAKER_01Fluoride, I mean fluoride is very difficult. It's a very small molecule. What's the what's the molecular weight of fluoride? Maybe 19. I can't remember from the tiny, I know, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, you have to have a really sophisticated system to get fluoride out of the drinking water. They're available, um, they're somewhat costly, which you know, things that work are typically more expensive.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I have one and I s I Noticed that it actually was filtering out fluoride, which made me excited. So I I saw that.
SPEAKER_01Let me tell you my question on your question.
SPEAKER_02Oh, but so I guess my question on all of that is I want more gains in the gym. I want to be less out of breath in the gym when I'm doing it and all those kind of things. So can you overdo it on nitric oxide? Like if I was taking a lozenge before I was working out or something like that, am I going to go too far potentially?
SPEAKER_01There's only two things we worry about, and the toxicity that defines nitric oxide, or the two endpoints that define nitric oxide toxicity are low blood pressure and methemoglobinemia. But we've never seen a case of methemoglobinemia. I mean, we've never really seen a case of hypotension. But if you think about it, if there's a biologically plausible mechanism, and if you know, if you put 15, 20 lozenges in my lozenge in your mouth, it may dilate your blood vessels, you lose perfusion pressure, you get lightheaded, and may pass out. But we've never seen a case of methemoglobinemia. In fact, there was a 16-year-old kid we published, we studied at Texas Children's Hospital. We were giving him one lozenge every four hours, and we brought his blood pressure down from 210 over 115 to 130 over 80 within four hours. But we had to give him a lozenge every four hours, and we were drawing blood, we were looking at met levels, and even one every four hours, there was no increase, no change in methemoglobin levels. So it's again, it's dose dependent. Dose dictates the poison. But in our consumer products, we've never seen this happen, an unsafe drop in blood pressure or any any clinical signs of methemoglobinemia.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And then is it hard on the liver at all or not?
SPEAKER_01Not at all. I mean, we've seen liver enzymes come down, we've seen renal function improve, we've seen markers of inflammation come down. In fact, they have patents on methods of reducing inflammation. We see a reduction in triglycerides, uh, mobilized stem cells. Now, look, nitric oxide, and whether it's any liver disease, pulmonary disease, kidney disease, there's four common denominators. There's always reduced blood supply to that organ, there's runaway inflammation, there's oxidative stress, and there's immune dysfunction. And if we give nitric oxide, it dilates the blood vessels, it eliminates the inflammation, it inhibits oxidative stress, and it corrects the immune dysfunction in that organ. So it addresses all aspects of chronic disease. No matter if it's the liver, the heart, the lung, the brain, kidneys, doesn't matter. Same mechanism.
SPEAKER_02And and did I, did I, I can't remember if it was on your your site, uh Nathan or not. Did it did uh have some kind of um effect on sleep?
SPEAKER_01You know, it does. That was probably the number two or number three response we get from people that they sleep better. And honestly, I don't have a mechanism or an explanation of how it's affecting sleep. I mean, it's met maybe it's better blood flow. I mean, we know we improve cerebral blood flow. We've done functional MRI measurements, we do spec scans, we know it's improving cerebral blood flow. So maybe just better blood flow, better delivery of uh, you know, amino acid transmitters, better sleep pattern, better oxygenation. I don't have an explanation for. But it's very common. I mean, that's the probably the besides more energy, uh, better sexual performance, sleep is probably top two or three.
SPEAKER_00And you you you mentioned the consumer side of it and then the the pharmaceutical side. So it can people get this over the counter? Do they need a prescription or how does it work exactly?
SPEAKER_01No, we've we've had consumer products on the market for more than a decade. But yeah, we've got uh dietary supplements on the market. I make a topical nitric oxide for skincare and beauty. I make a fluoride-free toothpaste because you know, I've known about the dangers of fluoride for 30 years, and I was using a fluoride-free toothpaste, but as we learn more about these oral bacteria, there were things in these fluoride-free toothpaste that were causing, destroying the biofilms and the communities and leading to loss of diversity. So I was forced to make my own toothpaste that provided the conditions for the for the bacteria that we were culturing and understanding the environment and the ecology. So I made a nitric oxide microbiome-friendly toothpaste. Um, and so we got that, and then we have a fermented beet powder that we make for pre-workout or energy. Uh, and what else? We're making a nitric oxide-friendly mouth rinse because two out of Americans, two out of three Americans use mouthwash every day, completely killing their microbiome. So again, I feel an obligation to give them a safe and effective mouth rinse, to give them clean breath, but doesn't kill them. You know, we published more than 10 years ago, people use mouthwash, it kills the bacteria, their nitric oxide goes down, their blood pressure goes up. You know, the same thing. I've had a funny story. There was a buddy of mine in the gym in Miami last week, and he was working out with this guy, just met him, and he goes, and he was listening to one of my podcasts on Diary of a CEO. He goes, You got to listen to this guy, and he's one of my good friends. He goes, I know that guy. So he just called me up, FaceTiming, and that guy said that he heard that me talk about the dangers of fluoride. He switched to a fluoride-free toothpaste. He's dealt with high blood pressure for 10 years. His blood pressure normalized, his workouts in the gym improved, his fatigue went away. And that's just by eliminating toothpaste and switching to a toothpaste that focuses on nitric oxide. And that's how profound these changes are.
SPEAKER_02So I just want to say if you want to check out Brian, uh Nathan's Nathan Dr. Nathan Bryan's site, it's n101.com. I have that right, Nathan. Yes?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's the letter N number one, letter O number one.com. It's not N101, it's n101.com.
SPEAKER_02And Nathan, is it when you're taking these supplements, like is it safe to take them daily? Like, should like part of like a dietary supplement?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've been taking a form of my product for probably 20 more than 20 years, probably 25 years. I'm 52 years old now. And once I figured out that I know how to make nitric oxide and I could deliver this in a form, I've been taking it. And my first metric, kind of like Dom's, was I go to the gym and I know how many pull-ups I can do, how many push-ups I can do. And so I'd go and I, you know, most of the time I can get you know 15, 20 pull-ups without fail. And I took this, again, this has been 25 years ago and I was a much younger man. But I'd go in, I'd take it right when I went in like two to three minutes before, and it's so fast acting, I go up there and I'm doing 25 and 30 pull-ups without fail. Not going.
SPEAKER_02Oh, so it it hits, you're telling me it hits right away.
SPEAKER_01In our products, when you put it in solution, the beef powder, put the lozage in your mouth, it's immediately releasing nitric oxide gas. 20 to 30 parts per million, the same amount that they give to premature babies with pulmonary hypertension. And my thought was if 20 to 30 parts per million nitric oxide gas is safe in the most vulnerable, high-risk population in the world, a premature baby in critical care, then it's going to be safe for the general public. So that was my target. And then, but I had to deliver how much nitric oxide can I deliver over a certain period of time? So I had to create this lozenge that slowly dissolves over five to six minutes to release a certain amount of nitric oxide that's not dependent upon salivary pH. It's not dependent upon the presence or absence of bacteria because I want it to work in every single person, not in 50% of the people, not in 10% of the people, 100% of the people. So that way we we can do ultrasound. And we put the lozenge in your mouth, we can watch in real time your crowded artery dilate within 10 to 12 seconds.
SPEAKER_02This is basically the Viagra of workouts and sex and everything. You're telling me it's just crazy fast acting and it does all these things.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Wow. It's all about blood flow. Gotta try it.
SPEAKER_02We uh sit Ben, the the industry that Ben and I are are in is is is more the aesthetics industry. Does it have any effect on skin or those types of things?
SPEAKER_01No, of course it does. I mean, skin's an organ just like the heart, the brain, or the sex organs, you gotta have adequate blood supply. And what's what we're finding is again, the older you get, your microcirculation becomes compromised, and especially the microcirculation. And if you don't have good blood flow, then you develop, uh, you lose collagen, you lose hydration, your skin begins to sag, you get fine lines and wrinkles, and you lose cellular turnover. So I'll take you back 12 years ago. My dad had a he's a paraplegic, he's a had a car accident in 1984. So dad's been in a wheelchair for 40, 40, 42 years now, more than half his life. And so he's we've dealt with decubitus ulcers, pressure ulcers uh on dad, issual ulcers on his backside, foot ulcers. And for years I took him to wound care clinics and he developed a four, he had a four-year-old non-healing wound that became septic, he almost died. And the wound care clinic said you can never heal this wound. And I just refused to accept that. So I started making a topical nitric oxide and I would treat the wound. I'd do a wet to dry dressing every day, sometimes twice a day. And within six months, just putting nitric oxide into the wound bed and getting a hyperemic response and getting blood flow to that wound. And also, by the way, nitric oxide at the doses we're delivering kills infectious bacteria. So it kills the bacteria in the non-healing wound, it gets blood flow to the wound. And within six months, I healed a four-year-old non-healing wound with nitric oxide. And the wound care doctor were like, What the shit did you how did you do this? So then I developed a topical because I thought, okay, if this is good for a stage four non-healing wound, osteonecrotic osteomyelitis, then what will it do for skin care? So I developed a dual chamber nitric oxide skin care product, I guess in 2019 we launched it. But it's a dual chamber. Again, nitric oxide's a gas. So we combine these two components, it produces nitric oxide gas, it diffuses into the skin. You can your skin turns pink because we're recruiting capillaries. Uh, it improves collagen deposition. I think we got seven published peer-reviewed clinical trials on the serum. It's mobilizing stem cells. I mean, it's it's amazing for skin care and beauty. And we we've seen such an effect on wounds that we're we we've met with the FDA and we're developing a topical drug for diabetic ulcers and on-healing wounds. We've never seen a wound we haven't been able to heal with a nitric oxide.
SPEAKER_02You're a doctor, you sound incredibly knowledgeable. How are you enjoying running this as a business? Are you enjoying that part of it? It's a completely different world.
SPEAKER_01You know, I've I've trained and I spent 25 years in academia as a professor of molecular medicine. And then I had some really bad experiences in business. And from that point on, I never wanted to abdicate my science into the hands of people who didn't understand the science. All they wanted to do was make money and make money off of it. And they've they've bastardized the field. And so once I realized that I had to take control and step away from academia to become a business person and really to maintain the integrity of the field, it's completely different. You know, I miss some of the you know, the academic stuff, and I don't miss teaching. Teaching, teaching is uh you know time consuming, but I do miss the research, being in the lab, making discoveries. There's no feeling like discovering making discoveries. But I think, you know, every career there's an evolution. And I think my calling now is to take the science, because the scientific discoveries mean nothing if they don't translate into something, the improvement in in human medicine, whether it's the diagnosis, treatment of disease. And so now I think it's important for me to take on that new role and make sure that the products, the discoveries that I've made make it to market, whether it's consumer products, and I never got into this field to make consumer products, it was just kind of a byproduct of the discoveries. But my objective has always been to take this through the rigor of FDA, demonstrate safety, demonstrate efficacy. But the frustrations I have is you've got companies out there with no science, with CEOs, I see them on podcasts talking about the science of nitric oxide. These are marketing guys, former tech CEOs. And now they're they're talking about nitric oxide, and the misinformation is, I mean, it blows me away because again, from academia, what we try to do is we take information and impart knowledge, and from knowledge you gain wisdom. But if people are starting with misinformation, you never get knowledge, and then you can never get wisdom from that. So this is this is a very dangerous proposition that these companies that are irresponsible and deceptive and outright fraudulent are doing to the consumer because they're trying to convince you beets are nitric oxide, or you can get nitric oxide on a gummy or a chew. And it it's impossible. And they're doing this because it they're making a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, but it's doing the the field of nitric oxide a complete disservice.
SPEAKER_00It could actually completely kill the entire field, and that's that's it's it's what it's it's one of the downfalls of the social media of the influencer world that there's no regulation on what an influencer or you know, their their credit credibility or whatever. And in sometimes the least credible person can have the loudest voice, you know.
SPEAKER_01So that's completely another issue. You get these influencers who have no pedigree, no science background. Some of them would even have an advanced education or a college degree, and they're out there influencing millions and millions of people with with no basis for what they're doing. And people take this as the gospel, and it can be very dangerous.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we I like to say that thought leadership used to come from acknowledgement of accolades, experience, these types of things. And and that's what thought leadership was. It was it was based on a foundation of of having a knowledge that others don't. And I think obviously that's that's gone away. We have a question and uh two questions we ask every time. Uh, you kind of answered, I think, this last one, which is we always ask the question is what's complete bullshit in your field? And it sounds like there's a lot of bullshit supplements. Is that is that what we're saying?
SPEAKER_01Like the biggest piece of bullshit out there is beets that beets are nitric oxide. Beets are so far away from nitric oxide that it's humorous. It would be humorous, but it's it's it's dangerous and it's deceptive. And here's the challenge, and I've been getting these emails for for more than 15 years, 10 or 15 years. People go, Nathan, we heard you on the podcast, you talk about nitric oxide, but I've been taking this beet product that says it's nitric oxide. I see them advertised on TV, on radio, taking it, and it didn't do anything for me. So nitric oxide doesn't work for me. Nitric oxide's not that important. And that's a very dangerous interpretation because nitric oxide always works. What failed you was that company. What failed you was that product because that product didn't work for you because it can't work for you. These companies don't understand the basic biochemistry. I spent 25 years in the trenches, in the lab, bench side, understanding the enzymology, the biochemistry, and the microbiome and the ecology of what's required for nitric oxide production. These yahoos out there are, you know, taking kind of the headlines and saying, oh, beets are nitric oxide, arginine is nitric oxide. We can put 52 ingredients in a pouch and call it nitric oxide. And they're out there marketing. They say the exact same thing I can say. Because in dietary supplements, we're guided by the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act of 1994, I believe, De Shea. So which means you can make structure function claims, but you can't make any drug claims. So basically, everybody out there selling a nitric oxide product can say the exact same thing that I'm allowed to say. The difference is my challenge, leading as a chief executive officer and chairman, is how do I differentiate what I do from all these other Yahoos out there pitching so-called nitric oxide products using the exact same language? And for me, it's about trust. I'm less interested in making money. I'm more interested in educating the proper science of nitric oxide. And I don't care if you buy from me from not, but what I what I hope you do is you change your diet, you change your lifestyle, you eliminate fluoride, you eliminate mouthwash, you get off an acids, you eliminate drug therapy that's unnecessary, and you get off your ass, you exercise, you get out in the sun, and stop eating a shitty diet. That's what I hope people get out of this.
SPEAKER_02You know, Nathan, we struggle with this in our industry is that there are a lot of people out there that are taking needles and stick them in in people's faces, and they don't have the experience and they don't have the understanding, and and it's been a commoditization of excellence, but you can't commoditize excellence. Um, it's it's like you're saying that you've done the work, you've done uh all the things to understand it, you've done um the research and you've produced something that you know actually does indeed work. Um and I I just want to tell you as a as a CEO, I feel your pain on that because you're trying to get the world to understand the differentiation between those two things. Um we and by the way, I'd ask you the the final question, which is what in your industry is absolute magic? I think you've answered it. If you want unless it's any different than what you said, please let us know. But it sounds like nitric oxide is the magic thing in your in your world.
SPEAKER_01I mean, obviously I come into this with a very strong bias because that's the only thing I've done for the past almost 30 years.
SPEAKER_00I think it is his world.
SPEAKER_01That's right. But look, I think what I say that is completely corroborated by not just the basic science and mechanistic data, but the clinical data. We know that nitric oxide dilates blood vessels. We know it improves energy production and sexual functioning and cognitive performance, and it's the root cause of all age-related chronic disease. And so if we can prevent the age-related loss or give this molecule back at therapeutic doses, safe in therapeutic doses, it's going to change the world. I'm absolutely convinced of that. And, you know, I've had companies try to take me out hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm not doing this to make money. I've made enough money, I live very comfortably. My objective is to make sure this sees the light of day because this is very disruptive. Big drug companies would want to come in and shelve this technology. Because if I achieve what I hope to achieve and we get nitric oxide in every major market segment around the world, the need for drug therapy is going to go down.
SPEAKER_00And when you start watching out, you better have somebody test your car before you go to it.
SPEAKER_01I know that's right. I'm very aware of people, yeah. The situation I'm in, but you know, I'm I'm I'm more than willing and able to see this to the end because it's the right thing to do.
SPEAKER_02Well, listen, I I think we've really appreciated this conversation. Um, it's awesome. It's been fantastic. Um, this is Dr. Nathan Bryan. Um his website, N101. That's N is in nitric one, O is an oxygen1.com. N101.com, Dr. Nathan Bryan. Go check it out. Um, it's it's super cool. And we just want to thank you so much for spending your time with us. Um, this has been so great for us. We're always learning, and I think tonight this was a this was a big one for us. So we really appreciate you being here.
SPEAKER_01Let me do a shameless plug for my latest books called The Secret of Nitric.
SPEAKER_02I'm so sorry about that. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But this this book I published last year, it tells the whole story of nitric oxide. You know, I've done, I think I've done a pretty good job of taking a complex science and putting it as easy-to-read, digestible form. And it's it's a must read. If you're, you know, if you're healthy and don't want to get sick, it's a must read. If you're sick and want to get healthy, it's a must-read. Uh, and then subscribe to my YouTube channel, Dr. Nathan S. Bryan Nitric Oxide.
SPEAKER_00And from the longevity people, we we have a pretty good uh follow-in from that perspective. This is, I mean, I don't know if they're breaking into it. I know that it's it's topical, but I think uh the people that are really serious about it, it's a no-brainer. If the safety protocol is that strong and the efficacies are that strong, those are those are what how you make decisions.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, and just for everybody, it's the secret of nitric oxide. That's the book uh from Dr. Dathan Bryan. So please go check it out. Um, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, fellas. Enjoy it.