← Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD
Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD
136. Dr. Goodenowe: Plasmalogens and the Hidden Science of Longevity
01:08:53
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Welcome to xtend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah.
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A podcast dedicated to cutting edge science research tools and protocols designed to help.
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You extend your health span.
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Having become one of the youngest doctors.
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In the country at the age of.
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21 and trained and board certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results.
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When it comes to your health span.
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We are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system no longer focused on disease management.
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But achieving optimal health and vitality.
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Join me as I interview world renowned experts offering you a step by step guide to proactively avoid disease and most importantly, extend your health span. Today we're joined by Dr. Dan Goodenow. He's a neuroscientist, biochemist, synthetic organic chemist, and one of the most influential researchers in modern cellular health. In 1999, he invented a groundbreaking mass spectrometry technology that allows scientists to analyze human biochemistry in unprecedented detail. After studying tens of thousands of people, he discovered something revolutionary. Every major disease has an early biochemical signature, a prodrome that appears years or even decades before symptoms. His work led to patents across more than 20 diseases and to one of the most important innovations in preventative medicine. Plasmalogen precursor technology designed to restore critical molecules that decline early in aging, cognitive decline and chronic disease. Dr. Goodenow is a founder of Prodrome science and the creator of the Prodrome scan, a test that measures key biomarkers of vulnerability long before disease develops. His mission is simple but profound. Don't wait for disease, measure health, maintain it and restore the body's biochemical resilience before things break. In this episode, we get into plasmaogens, early brain deterioration, the future of diagnostics, and how MRI technology is evolving, the three M's of longevity and why purpose and mood are biochemical necessities for long term vitality. Here's Dr. Dayne.
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Got to know. Doctor Goodenow. It's such an incredible honor to have you here. As I was just telling you, very star struck to have you here. You're one of those scientists that all of us longevity physicians, or just physicians in general, really look up to as really creating an entire new thought process around cellular health that we've never had before. So thank you for joining.
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Well, thank you Dr. Shah. I'm so happy to be here.
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Yeah, so, you know, I think I'd love to start the conversation with there's an entire body of cellular health that most physicians don't have access to. And that is the integrity and the function of the cellular membrane, the membrane around the cell.
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Right.
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And we call this membrane a lipid bilayer.
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Right.
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Or a bilipid layer. And we don't really think about it a lot because we don't think there's any way to really affect it or there's nothing we can really do about it. Right. Except we try to get drugs smashed through this lipid bilayer into the cell. And so that's the only reason we really study it. But you've dedicated your entire career to molecules that function in this bilayer and their precursors and et cetera, and really have seen massive improvement in many health conditions. And just to kind of frame the conversation, that's what we're going to be diving into today.
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Awesome.
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I love it.
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Cellular biochemistry is my briar patch.
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I could tell, I could tell. So I would love to hear just from, you know, a big picture how you discovered molecules that could function in this way and like your backstory for sure, in coming into this field. Yeah.
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But what's so exciting about doing all this work right now is because I'm a PhD research science in neurochemistry and synthetic organic chemist. I'm not a medical doctor. Right. So I come through my educational program looking at these basic science avenues.
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Exactly.
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And we do clinical, we do research, animal studies, cell culture studies, and we study science from that type of hypothesis driven perspective. Right. And the medical doctors in the world, they have a different type of training.
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Right.
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They deal with, you know, how do I, how do I use and apply tools and technologies, whereas whether it's a drug, whether it's a therapy, how do I diagnose a given condition? And you're working so intimately with the human condition.
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Right.
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And then that goes on and they become basically artists in working in, in with their patients. And so what's exciting, what I was working together, is that I've had to come from the scientific background. And then most scientists don't ever see a human being. Right. They're in laboratories or we, we deal with large amounts of information, we publish papers, we go to hold the conferences that scientists go to. Medical doctors don't go to.
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Exactly.
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And the conferences that medical doctors go to, scientists don't go to.
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Absolutely.
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And so there's two different worlds and they very rarely combine.
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Right.
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And what's so exciting about this advanced medical area is all these doctors are really getting excited about cellular chemistry and understanding there's got to be more. And many of them have, you know, had personal experiences where they've used their training and say, you know what, something's missing, right. Like, you know, I've kind of exhausted the medical tools at my disposal, but I'm not giving up. So they start digging deeper and deeper.
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Right.
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Things. And that's kind of where we meet in the middle.
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Exactly.
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Which is, which is really quite exciting. And then the other aspect of my background is in infrastructure like logistics, like clinical trials, laboratories, manufacturing, you know, which is, you know, when you're going to this new advanced world of cellular biochemistry, you have all these products but they're being used by specialty doctors and little pieces here, little pieces there and trying to organize and consolidate them. And so this has been just a wonderful experience for me and I'm getting more and more addicted to working with all these doctors with every waking month.
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It's like you're like vertically integrating everything in the process, right? Like you've gone from the cellular biochemistry to the manufacturing and the actual, the scientific tools that you use as well, all the way up to the patient care piece of it and bringing it the full journey, which is so exciting.
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We're all kind of kids in a new toy store. Basically. The medical doctors are coming in. Oh, I had no idea. There's some cool toys in here I can play with.
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Right.
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And then I'm on the other side saying, this is great. We actually have case studies, we can do case series, we can take here's complex patients that we can work together with. We can do advanced blood testing, we do advanced mri. We can intervene with these biochemical intermediates like plasmalogens. And so it's been really kind of my background is like a doctor's background, but in a different area. So I start from scratch from my first, you know, addiction to chemistry, understanding how the biochemistry of the world works. And so my background is in that biochemical perspective. And then back in the 90s, we were doing all these genomics, right? We're sequencing the human genome for the first time and we're trying to understand gene expression analysis and scientists were developing these what's called non targeted methods.
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Okay.
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Science typically has always been hypothesis driven, right? You could think of an idea, say, hey, vitamin C, I'm going to test vitamin C on something, right? Sure. But when we started sequencing the whole genome of the human body, we didn't know anything about any of these genes, right? So it became hypothesis creating. So we actually run the experiments first and then look at the data Afterwards and say, hey, what's going on? And that changed that. I don't think people truly realize how that period of time in the 90s upended 5,000 years of philosophy.
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Wow.
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For the first time in our life, we could generate these large data sets, right? And then after the fact, say, what's in here? And me as a biochemist, there was no tool to measure biochemistry comprehensively, right? And so my first real invention was this ion cyclotron technology that measured thousands and thousands of molecules simultaneously without knowing what they are at first.
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Yes.
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And so then you apply this type of technology to different disease states. So we look at people with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or colon cancer and pancreatic cancer, and we say, okay, if you have a group of people that are cancer free, for example, and you have a group of people with cancer, there's obviously difference. Like there should be biochemical difference because our human body is a biochemical system, right? And this advanced technology was able to identify the biochemical differences between people with different diseases. And in Alzheimer's, in cognition, one of the molecules that showed up was these plasmaogens. And I had no idea what they were. And I'm a neurochemist, right? I've studied. My whole training is on the biochemistry of the brain, right? And so I'm finding these molecules really low in all these people with cognitive impairment or dementia. And the more severe the depletion was, the more severe the dementia was. And we did multiple, multiple trials on this. And so the way the mass spectrometer works, it measures accurate mass and you get the molecular formula, okay. And these molecules with this NPO7 structure was coming up and it's gone, which is very strange for me because it's normally eight oxygens. So it's really geeking out on you right now. But so I'm looking at these molecules and I'm going, what are these things? And seriously, I back in, I was googling, trying to figure out these structures. I found out they're called plasmalogens. So I wasn't the person who invented or discovered plasmaogens for the very first time. Like those were discovered back in the 20s.
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Wow.
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And we've known the critical component of plasmaogens because we have certain rare diseases that are mutations that are known that if people have mutations in certain genes that make plasma allergens, you get children that have called one of the diseases called rhizome con, dysplasia, puncta. There's others like leukodystrophies and Things.
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Uhhuh.
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These children are born with dwarfism, they're born with intellectual disabilities. They ultimately die within a short period of life. So we know plasma is, plasma are critical.
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Right.
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And these are molecules that are part of this lipid bilayer that you're talking about. And so that's kind of where that.
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All, that's where it all came from.
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And then, then you kind of, it's like pulling a, a thread of yarn and you kind of get, you get something and you get kind of curious about it, and then you kind of keep on pulling the string and then, you know, 20 years later, you're still doing this.
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Yeah. You're still pulling this train. So just to kind of like paint the picture there, I mean, this is pretty incredible that there was a scientific revolution that happened with the sequencing of the genome, because the first time we could just create a massive data set and then be like, what does this data even mean? And so that kind of changed your thought process around just, just how to approach science. So you invented a machine that could then look at thousands of serum biomarkers, I assume in the serum.
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Right.
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And you, you have, now you have thousands of markers and you don't know what they mean. So your idea then was to look at someone that had Alzheimer's and then one that didn't and what was the difference in their, in that data?
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Right.
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And so then you can extrapolate like this person with Alzheimer's has these molecules or deficiency of these molecules that this person doesn't have.
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Correct.
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And then you went down into that rabbit hole into what are those molecules, and you found out that they were actually discovered before they were plasmaogens. And now you have a group of molecules that, you know, have some association with Alzheimer's disease. And, but at this point you probably don't know whether they, whether Alzheimer's or even like ALS or Parkinson's, if, if the problem was the deficiency of these. Or maybe there's just an association. Right, Correct. Is it, is there a causation or association between this and. So how do you kind of figure that question out? How do you.
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So those, those that falls at different line of clinical trials for the plasmalogens. The reason why it was determined to be causal is that we look at the longitudinal nature of individuals, so we can do cross sectional analysis of individuals at different stages of disease.
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Got it.
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And then we did a large study with Rush University in Chicago where they have a very large longitudinal trial. It's been going on for 20 some years. And we could and the blood samples are stored. And so then we could take blood samples, be at. Before people had dementia.
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Yes.
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And we could predict who would get dementia in the future based upon blood levels. And so those people that had. That were not cognitively impaired. So they had normal cognition, but they had low blood plasma allergens. Those individuals became demented in the near future. And so we just saw that this was linked to. That was one of the big aspects of it. Another area that we really did a lot of work with is in cancer.
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Okay.
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And so the real genesis of prodromes, because when I first developed this technology, I thought, well, this is, like, great. It's a diagnostic. We can diagnose disease.
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Yeah. It's like a blood test. Right.
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And we can do early detection of disease.
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Yeah.
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And cancer is a good example. We'd expect this tumor is doing something to the body. Right. And so cancers have these other deficiencies that are very commonly observed, these GTAs and phosphatel cholines.
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Okay.
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And we did this at the time. This was back in the early 2000s. We expected that the tumor must be consuming these molecules.
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Yeah.
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Creating this deficiency.
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Got it.
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So we did this study in Osaka, Japan, where we looked at people with colon cancer before and after surgery. So we did blood testing. They went for surgery. They were called cancer free. And we were expecting these biomarkers come back to normal.
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This is not being consumed anymore.
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It didn't happen. Biomarkers were exactly the same. No change in the biomarkers at all. And we said, wow, this was not what we expected. So we redid the entire project over again with a different university, this time in Chiba University outside of Tokyo, and got exactly the same results. And that's when the light bulb really came on in that we're actually measuring people that will get future disease. We're not measuring molecules afterwards. And so this is a concept of prodromes. And so we're measuring ball tires that become flat. Okay. We're not actually measuring a puncture wound. Okay. We're actually measuring a ball tire and saying, hey, right. You're likely to get a flat tire in the future if you continue on. And this is where the plasmas had very similar situation because they're also low in cancer patients, not just dementia patients. And they don't get. We did a big study with breast cancer. This is with another project in Japan with Kyoto University, with high, high diagnostic accuracy. That 93% diagnostic accuracy. And we looked at women. We did two separate studies out of Kyoto on breast cancer, looking at before and after proper surgery and chemo. And again, not only did the plasmas not come back to normal, the chemotherapy actually reduced the plasmas even further, which leads to this whole concept of recurrence of disease.
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Right?
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Right. So a lot of times when we think we're treating a disease like a cancer, where we remove the tumor, but we all know that people who have a history of cancer have a higher probability of recurrence than someone who never had cancer in the first place, right? And so we could actually explain that. We could actually explain why previous cancer made you more susceptible to future cancer.
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Okay? Okay.
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And so this is. So we understand these prodromes now. So clearly there is this concept of deviation from health versus disease. So it's kind of the concept because we think of disease like a pathology, right? We think, oh, I get infection or get something, like something happened, happened to me. Right. And that's a normal process, but in reality, we lose health.
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Right?
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And this is what gets exciting about the whole longevity, immortality, okay. Concept of quantitative immortality. Because you don't actually get disease, you lose health, you lose health.
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Right.
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And you don't actually die, you lose life. And as a scientist, go back to physics, right? You know, and I'm a Canadian boy. So we talk about cold, right? It was always cold. And well, technically it's not cold.
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It's just less lack of heat, right?
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And so. Which is hard. It's a hard argument to make sometimes when it's 40 degrees below. But the point is, is that technically speaking, there's no such thing as cold, right? There's either heat or lack of heat. And so technically there's no such thing as death. There's either life or lack of life. Like you don't. You don't actually get death.
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Death, right, exactly.
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You don't actually get disease other than the bacterial infection, for example.
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Yes, yes.
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And so this whole concept now says. Well, that also changes your own mindset, because now you say, if the loss of health is what gives me disease, or the loss of life is what gives me less longevity or death, then what is health? What is life biochemically? And can we then measure that? Because we can predict mortality.
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Sure.
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And this is the issue with the Rush University project, because we're doing it with prediction of dementia, but of course, this is elderly population and they eventually die. And so we also, completely serendipitously, we said, oh, wow, you know what? Let's look at all cause mortality, okay? And turned out that the plasmaogens predicted all cause mortality more than dementia. It was a 30 year difference in lifespan based upon someone's plasmaogen levels.
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Wow.
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It was a crazy, crazy number.
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That is crazy.
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But this changes the whole world because now it's opened up a whole new idea that we can say, you know what that stop chasing disease, let's create health. Let's create health.
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Yeah.
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And so. But then we have to measure just the deviation from health.
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Right.
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Now it's the concept of the dipstick in your car. Right. I don't wait for engine failure if the level is supposed to be a certain level, because below that level, I top it off. Right. And so that's the concept of here's healthy oil levels.
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Yes.
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And we know that. And I always make this joke, you know, if you're old enough, you had old cars that used to burn oil.
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Yeah.
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And so I used to have a car. I same every time I got gas, I had to check the oil. Right. And so just to make sure.
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Yeah.
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But now my new car, I hardly ever checked the oil. I checked the oil every, you know, two, 3,000 miles. And it's the oil change. Right. So this is the, this is the whole concept of preventative maintenance.
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Right, Right.
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And the concept of now, if we can understand our health and we can understand the, the time frame for certain deviations, we can start reducing some of our anxiety. We don't have to be so obsessive on everything.
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Yes.
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Because that's one of the challenges with health. No one really knows what's going to happen to them next. Right. So we're always a little bit worried.
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Right.
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You know, walk down the street, going to get hit by lightning or am I going to get some disease?
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Yeah.
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And you have no knowledge. And so that's kind of where we're working together more on now is understanding what health is.
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Yes.
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So that we can measure the deviation from health.
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Right.
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And then once we measure deviation from health, we say, well, let's restore it.
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Restore it. Right.
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And then we want to have fun, we want to push it even further.
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Exactly. Then we can push it even further. So and that's the concept also being resilience. Right. Because when you push it further, you can be resilient to anything that that occurs. Right. But just to take it back a little bit. So plasmalogen molecules, what you found was a deficiency of these molecules led to not just Alzheimer's, but all cause mortality, meaning cardiovascular disease, cancers, everything. And so. And a deficiency also led to recurrence of tumors. So the, the situation is one in which if you know your plasmalogens are low, you need to get them back up to a normal level. And that is one aspect of creating health. And when you have health, that is the absence of disease. And so I always say, you know, splashing on our walls here is that true health is not simply the absence of disease, is the abundance of being. Having vitality. Right, Exactly. So I think plasmalogen is one of those molecules is not often talked about as being a component to that vitality.
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Well, and once you dig into these plasma molecules, you really get almost angry because why have you not been told? We're talking molecules that 20, 30% of your entire brain. Children development the myelination of the brain. Okay. Children are born slightly plasmaogen development. There's plasma precursors in breast milk that link to increased white matter development. But we're talking about molecules that make up, you know, a huge percentage of the myelin sheet, the protective coating on your axons in your synapses, the gray matter. Like 85% of the of these ethanolamines are plasmalogens. 50 of the total lipid compound composition of your heart or plasmas, high levels in your kidneys. They, they are, they are critical drivers of your reverse cholesterol transport system. So you're talking about HDL levels, they drive HDL control.
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Okay.
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People think about Alzheimer's disease and the APOE 4 genotype.
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Yeah.
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And plasmas are related to the amyloid processing system in the brain.
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Okay.
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And so we're not dealing with some trace level molecule.
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Right.
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Like not, not even. Like if you talk about there's a lot of these, like a serotonin neurotransmitter or like we're talking a core structural molecule. It's on the same playing ground as cholesterol, if you will, and phosphol, choline. It's at that level of bulk.
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Yeah. And there's pounds and pounds in our body.
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Right. And it's interesting because the body is so dependent upon it.
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Right.
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It basically says, I'm not going to trust you to get it from your diet. I'm going to make it all myself. Cholesterol is another one.
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Right? Yes.
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Your body, we get very little cholesterol from our diet. Our body needs cholesterol so badly that it will make all of its cholesterol from scratch. Plasma is the same thing.
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Sure.
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And for most of your life, you're fine. Yeah. And it peaks in our blood levels in our brain in our 40s and 50s.
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Okay.
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And then it starts going down dramatically.
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So it actually peaks in the 40s and 50s. Oh, interesting. Okay.
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Assuming you're healthy.
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Yeah.
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Obviously be people with low levels earlier on.
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Right.
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That have other consequences.
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Your body makes it from precursors.
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So it does need new specific nutrients to make these plasmaogens, Right?
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Yeah. So actually the, the normal biosynth synthesis makes it from simple acetyl coa. It makes it from the simplest of simplest molecules. Absolutely. Very, very basic. But you can't. The question, the challenge that came up in the early 2000s is when we discovered these plasma allergens, then we had to do these testing. So you talk about causation, right?
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Yes.
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And so in order for us to test the causation, we need to be able to manipulate plasma levels. So how do I increase plasma levels? How do I decrease plasmaogen levels in animal studies? So the first thing was, how do we restore plasmaogens? Well, wasn't as easy as you think, because we're dealing in 2006 is when I first invented the first plasma precursor that could actually restore plasmaogen levels. You're thinking, well, that's 80 years after plasmaogens were discovered. And we've known these children are dying from plasmalogic deficiencies. So the inability to restore plasmaogens was a big, big problem that no one had solved. And so I was able to solve that.
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I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but these children are dying from plasmalogen deficiencies because they have a genetic condition that doesn't allow them to synthesize plasmalogen. That's why we know it's a critical molecule, because if you have a genetic deficiency, it's like a Mendelian study. Right. Like you, you know that these kids are going to die. So it's a critical molecule. And so then that from that we can infer that our body makes this for a critical reason, because without it, you will die. Right. And so. Okay, so, so then.
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And there's been other good scientists have looked at this in early childhood development and other areas. So plasmalogen had been studied, but nobody could actually manipulate plasma levels appropriately. And so in 2006, I invented these plasmaogen precursors.
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Okay.
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That could. They would come into the body's biochemical system just before you make the plasmaogen. So we could actually make whatever plasma algae we want using these precursors.
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So it's bypassing part of the synthesis system. Presumably, if you're a child that's deficient in one path, one part of the pathway, and you take a precursor, you bypass that system, and now you've bypassed that deficiency.
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C
And for the rest of us who just gradually get older. That one system is called your peroxis. So there's one of your organelles in your cells, okay, that make your plasmaogens, called proxyomes.
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And this is in every cell in the body.
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Every cell of the body, yeah.
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Okay.
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And typically that decreases in function as we get older.
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Got it.
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And so we stop making enough plasmaogens so we can replace them. So we all, as we get older, we become more and more like rcdp, basically aging. So, but, but back to your original question was, okay, what's the. The association versus causation?
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Yes, please.
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So now we could get these plasma precursors. We can now do animal studies. We can do cell culture studies, and we're able to show very clearly that they regulate hdl, like cholesterol transport. And then we can do these trials for really severe neurodegeneration studies.
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Okay.
- [24:39]
C
So, for example, Parkinson's. There's an animal model for Parkinson's called mptp, very reproducibly destroys dopamine neurons in the brain. And it's actually interesting. It was discovered by these kids in California in the, I think it was late 80s. They were trying to make designer heroin and. Exactly. So there's about. I can't remember how many. There's. There's three or four of them that, that showed up in the hospital in Riverside with full blown Parkinson's, look like in their 20s, like full blown Parkinson's, really. And they were going, what's going on with these people? They were totally frozen. And so they did the research and they found out that there was a toxic byproduct of their heroin manufacturing in their house that was called caused mptp. So ever since then, okay, we could, in animals, create Parkinson's on demand by giving this toxin.
- [25:25]
A
Oh, I see. Got it.
- [25:27]
C
So now we had this plasma precursor.
- [25:28]
B
Yes.
- [25:29]
C
We say, okay, let's, let's, let's give animals a toxin, but let's give them plasmalogens. If we give them the plasmaogens, the toxin doesn't cause any Parkinson's. We can completely prevent Parkinson's. Wow. And so it can. So you can restore the membrane of structure that this toxin was destroying.
- [25:45]
A
That's incredible.
- [25:46]
C
And then, and we, we know that plasma is associated with Parkinson's, is a risk factor. And we. For white matter disease, there's another toxin that we use. It's called cuprazone. It's a molecule that chelates copper, but it reproducibly creates multiple sclerosis. It depletes myelination. If you Give animals plasma precursors. The cuprone causes no demyelination. Like, it'll prevent the. It'll. It'll maintain myelination in the presence of these toxic mediators.
- [26:13]
A
Wow.
- [26:14]
C
So clearly tells us that deficient plasmas or insufficient plasmas lead, you know, are critical component of these diseases. So if you have high levels or if you supplement them. And which is why now we have all these clinical case studies with our patients with multiple sclerosis. You may have seen from one of mine with Lisa Grillo, who had. Was blind for 30 years, and. Yeah, she can see for the first time.
- [26:37]
A
Amazing.
- [26:37]
C
And we can restore that with plasma precursors. So that's kind of this causation. So now we know.
- [26:42]
A
Yes.
- [26:42]
C
Unambiguously, that they're not, you know, bystanders of an accident. Like, they're not some. Some. Some, you know, serendipitous, you know.
- [26:52]
A
Right, right. It's not like just a biomarker of the disease is actually a part of the disease process. So with. I mean, that's incredible that with Parkinson's, they. There's this drug that was discovered by heroin makers in California that can create Parkinson's in animals. And if you give a plasmalogen, you can actually prevent the Parkinson's from happening with this drug. And the same holds true with Ms. You said with the other drug that can create Ms. In animals as well, we can bypass the drug. And so this could be a potential molecule for people that are suffering from Parkinson's or Ms. To utilize in their overall treatment algorithm.
- [27:34]
C
Exactly. And this is this whole restorative health model, how we can actually. And the resilience of the human body, the adaptability of the human body and the human brain is quite remarkable. People. And, you know, I spend a lot of time on the neurological side of the equation because it seems to be preponderance. But the myocarditis, like a lot of the myocarditis that children were getting with COVID A lot of our pediatricians use plasmaogens very effectively at restoring heart structure and function in these children. But for brain, we use advanced mri, so we can actually now study the regrowth of the brain.
- [28:06]
A
Right.
- [28:06]
C
So for Lisa Grillo, for Ms. Or other patients with Parkinson's, we can now study how the brain responds with aging and how we can reverse the aging of the brain and restore the health and function of the brain. Because, you know, one of the things we use with the advanced MRI technology is we can measure cortical thickness with accuracy.
- [28:24]
A
Yes.
- [28:25]
C
And so we measure like 600 regions of the brain and it's, certain areas get thin. And I'm a good case study of that myself because I thought I'd be, you know, a control animal, if you will. I'm high functioning, I'm fine.
- [28:36]
A
Yeah.
- [28:37]
C
So I got my, my advanced brain scan done like three years ago now, almost four years ago, and unfortunately I had some areas, I had a concussion when I was 8 years old. So it's actually had post concussive industry from 8 years to my.
- [28:51]
A
Yeah.
- [28:52]
C
And certain areas of my occipital cortex, which related to my vision, were quite thin. And I've been able to restore those completely. So I, I've been able to reverse the aging of my, my brain back into its 40s now.
- [29:02]
A
Wow.
- [29:03]
C
Over the course of these several years. And we can now track that.
- [29:05]
A
And so with the mri, with the MRI scan.
- [29:08]
C
And what's important about us is that the brain is kind of like a muscle. Like if you, if you wake, you work out with weights, you're going to build muscle.
- [29:16]
A
Right.
- [29:16]
C
If your brain can restore its function, it actually restores the thickness of those, that, that, that layer. And so that's kind of what we're doing with all of our clients now. We, we can actually get their baseline brain scans, put them on an advanced protocol. Plasma is a critical component of it. Obviously, while we have their attention, we, you know, give them a few more things. Yeah. And then we can monitor their brain restoration now in a quantitative way.
- [29:40]
A
Got it.
- [29:41]
C
This is where this whole, you know, quantitative immortality comes in, where we can actually say, hm, can we actually get to a point where we can have a high degree of predictability that you're not going to die? Which is kind of another weird flip on the script because we're normally trying to predict when you die or we're trying to predict when you'll get a disease.
- [30:01]
B
Yeah.
- [30:02]
C
But if we, if we reverse the, the, the statistics and we say, okay, what's the probability? You know, so really immortality is the probability that you're going to die in the next two years to be zero.
- [30:14]
A
Sure.
- [30:14]
C
And then two years from now, I want to redo that. And if it's still zero, and I just want every year to be zero. Zero.
- [30:20]
A
Exactly. For sure. I mean, so the way these molecules work is sounds like there's one group of them that can help you remyelinate or help you cover the axons of your neurons. So for people that don't know your neurons are your brain cells, axons are the big long connections between Neurons, and they need to have a covering around them, just like an electrical wire. Right. If the electrical wire doesn't have a covering, it'll short circuit. It won't work. Corre. And so these molecules cover the neurons so they can connect better. And this actually shows up in the MRI as kind of thickening of your brain tissue. Right. When you say cortical thinning, it's the brain tissues thinning. And then if you can thicken them up again, that's a sign of a young brain, of a healthy brain.
- [31:08]
B
Right.
- [31:08]
A
And so you see that in this special MRI that you do. And can anyone get this MRI? Like, if I'm 53 now, I want to get an MRI to see what my brain ages based on the thickness of my brain. Can I do that?
- [31:20]
C
Absolutely.
- [31:21]
A
Yeah.
- [31:21]
C
Just give us a call. We'll. We'll schedule a visit. I love it. And we'll go through it and we, you know, we look at the cortical thickness, we look at blood flow, we look at. We have some advanced called neurite imaging that looks at the fiber densities. And so for people that don't, you know, study the brain all day long.
- [31:37]
A
Yeah.
- [31:37]
C
People think of the brainstorm as like a computer.
- [31:39]
A
Yes.
- [31:40]
C
And it's so shocking to me when we're looking at our health and vitality, we want to look at our body fat, muscle density, and all the things. We kind of forget what's going on behind our skull because we can't really see it.
- [31:49]
A
Well, it's kind of a black box because there's no good way to really evaluate it. Until now. Until MRI technology.
- [31:54]
C
Exactly.
- [31:55]
A
And I think for people to know, too, is you can't just get an MRI anywhere. MRI is a piece of hardware. It's the software that really is the. I mean, you need a good piece of hardware, but then you need some really cool software to take advantage of the data you're getting from the mri.
- [32:09]
C
Well, and that's the real frustrating part for medical doctors. Right. Because you're only. You only, you know, you send someone in for an mri, it's like whatever the MRI tech has. Right. It's a T1 or, you know, and what I found so frustrating because when I come into this space, I come in as a researcher and I research all the literature papers, and so people have been doing advanced MRI for years.
- [32:29]
A
Yeah.
- [32:30]
C
Right. But no doctor has access to this.
- [32:32]
A
No.
- [32:32]
C
Like, it's like. So it's not like. And this is a whole frustrating thing about some of the biochemistry that I teach people it's not like I invented all this technology. Like, a lot of the stuff. There's been really massively intelligent people doing amazing work, but we don't have the implementation. We don't have access to it. Right. Like, we use the ion cyclotrons in our lab for. For measuring thousands of molecules. And we're the only place in the world that you can get a commercially available blood test for plasmalogen levels and sphingyelins and a whole bunch of other things that are important. But it's not like I invented those molecules. There's papers for the last 20 years in specialty labs looking at this. And same thing with mri. And so what we've really done is saying, how do we commercialize this? How do we. How do we create tools and education.
- [33:15]
A
Sure.
- [33:16]
C
So any doctor can get, like. So we use this neurite orientation dispersion density index called nodi.
- [33:21]
A
Okay.
- [33:22]
C
And it gives you white matter microstructure analysis.
- [33:25]
A
Okay.
- [33:26]
C
And I didn't invent the technology. Like, we. We tweak it a little bit, but there's no MRI facility that can do it. When we first ran it, it took us seven days. So it's five minutes in the scanner, and it was seven days of computer processing time.
- [33:41]
A
Wow.
- [33:42]
C
Okay. And so then we. And so then we took the seven days. So. Which is why it's only done in some academic center. Right. And then it got down to 48 hours. And. And now we've got it down to. It's a reason. Like, we've put supercomputer.
- [33:52]
A
Okay.
- [33:52]
C
Behinding. And so. But so now people can go and get this advanced brain scan, and it measures the. The. The white matter microstructure, something that you can.
- [34:01]
A
What does that tell you?
- [34:02]
C
It shows. So it's. So we talk about this. So the brain, again, people think of as a computer, but it's not. It's like a wiring diagram.
- [34:08]
A
Right.
- [34:08]
C
It's areas of gray matter connected by these wires.
- [34:11]
A
Right.
- [34:12]
C
White matter. And as we get older, the. The wiring kind of. The coating kind of gets dissipated or like old wires in your wall, if you will. Right. And so this measures the structure of that versus just the volume. So you actually measure how the wires are working inside there.
- [34:28]
A
Okay.
- [34:29]
C
And that's actually quite responsive to treatment. So when we restore that. And it's also the association with age is very strong. So there's certain things that are more accurate determiners of the function of the brain, and those. Those are things that are responsive to the adaptability. So we've Been able to restore that, which is exciting. So, yeah, the last thing in the world you want to have is a blood test or some test that says it sucks to be you.
- [34:52]
A
Yeah.
- [34:53]
C
You know what I mean? You're going to die. Great. No, so this, what's cool about biochemistry and this MRI neurology is that these are all intervenable programs.
- [35:05]
A
Absolutely.
- [35:05]
C
That you actually measure this stuff, not just to be morbid, but you actually measure it, say, okay, I can work on that. I can actually. Okay, if I. If I do these things, then I can come back and I can test it again and I can build a trajectory back and I can build a program that I can reproducibly, you know, rinse and repeat, if you will, and go forward.
- [35:25]
A
What's really frustrating for me as a physician is, you know, when I was taught about Alzheimer's disease, for example, in medical school, I was taught you wait for symptoms. The ones the symptoms get really bad. You have to confirm Alzheimer's by getting a PET scan. And the PET scan lights up with amyloid. And by then we all know it's just way too late to do anything significant. Right. You're just making a diagnosis to basically tell someone it sucks to be you. Right. And what's frustrating for me is that there's this incredible technology out there, like the advanced mri, where you take so much data and you crunch it using a supercomputer, finally go down from seven days to one day, and you get a score for how well your neurons are connected. And then once you have that score, you can do something about it through various interventions, including plasmaogens, to see the score improve. Right. And you can track this longitudinally over time with a 5 minute MRI scan, Is that what you're saying?
- [36:21]
C
Well, ours is a little longer than that.
- [36:22]
A
Okay.
- [36:23]
C
It's about 45 minutes.
- [36:24]
A
45 minutes. Okay.
- [36:25]
C
Because we do about do eight or nine different sequences.
- [36:27]
A
Got it, Got it. But. But is that kind of what we're saying here?
- [36:29]
C
Is that exactly.
- [36:30]
A
That we can actually test score the functionality of your brain? So we're not just talking disease here. We're talking like you're a highly functioning individual and you found out that you had remnants of cte?
- [36:41]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [36:41]
A
And you were able to improve that?
- [36:43]
C
Yes.
- [36:43]
A
And now you're. Are you more high functioning nowadays?
- [36:45]
C
Very much so. Multitasking is so much better.
- [36:49]
A
Amazing.
- [36:50]
C
Yeah. I vision. So for example, my vision is back to when I was 17. Wow. Okay. So I have. I don't get headaches anymore. And so I just got My prescription, my near sightedness has changed my whole score. It was like used to be minus 1.75 and now it's 0.75.
- [37:03]
A
Right.
- [37:04]
C
Like seriously, quantitative improvement in vision.
- [37:07]
A
That's incredible.
- [37:08]
C
And so, yes, it's highly. You feel it in your own regular life. Same thing with muscle mass like we work on. We now have tools. We can very clearly build muscle in an individual at 70 at the same rate as we can build it at 30. And I'm, I'm physically stronger than I was in my 20s and 30s.
- [37:25]
A
What are the tools for building muscle mass that you're working on?
- [37:27]
C
So we create. So one of the things that people deal with when, when they're. You go through these cycles of fasting and fed states every single day of your life.
- [37:38]
A
Right.
- [37:38]
C
And your body consumes energy from your fat cells, but it also takes energy from your muscle cells.
- [37:45]
A
Right.
- [37:45]
C
And so there's specific biochemical systems that we can restore that prevent muscle wasting. And we, and this actually came in our work with als a lot and Parkinson's and people that we were restoring neurological function. But we're still having a hard time getting their, maintaining their weight and building their muscle structure. And so we've developed biochemical pathways that can restore muscle and build muscle mass at a much higher rate, which is kind of cool.
- [38:08]
A
Using plasma.
- [38:09]
C
Plasmas are a critical component of it. But these are your leucine amino acids. Certain, certain amino acids that your muscles deplete overnight time.
- [38:18]
A
Right, right, right.
- [38:19]
C
And so we make a kind of a. We call it a muscle water that people take at night and in the morning.
- [38:24]
A
What's in it? Leucine, I know is critical.
- [38:25]
C
Oh, it's got a bunch of leucine alanine. It's got myoinositol, it's got ketone esters.
- [38:32]
A
Yeah.
- [38:33]
C
Tryptophan. Try. You know, it's a bunch of stuff in there.
- [38:35]
A
Oh, and the name of this product is called.
- [38:37]
C
Well, it's called. We call it Muscle Water.
- [38:39]
A
Muscle Water.
- [38:39]
C
It's my.
- [38:39]
A
I love that.
- [38:40]
C
Okay. It's my, it's my 2O.
- [38:42]
A
My 2. Okay.
- [38:43]
C
I shouldn't. Well, not really commercially available. It is, it's part of our programs.
- [38:47]
A
But it's convince you to give me something.
- [38:49]
C
Yes, absolutely. It's quite addictive, actually. My own personal. Because I always test everything on myself.
- [38:53]
A
Yeah.
- [38:54]
C
I didn't change anything in my, my daily routine. Started using this. And over I think it was four to six weeks, I gained eight pounds of muscle using the in body and lost five pounds of Fat. It was a crazy thing. It was like, oh, this is weird. And so clearly there's something there. And many people get benefits from it.
- [39:13]
A
Incredible.
- [39:14]
C
But the point is the body is resilient, first of all, and it's adaptability and it's adaptable. And if we can restore the, the adaptability of the human body and then put that body in an environment, a stimulating environment, whether it's a mentally stimulating environment or physically stimulating environment, then we can. It can grow younger. So it's not about reversing your age, it's about getting older. But as you get older, you get better. Okay. Because you want to retain everything that you've learned and you want to maintain your function.
- [39:45]
A
Sure.
- [39:46]
C
And so, you know, we talk about, you know, we often, we use numbers people like to luck with their age, but it's really about function.
- [39:52]
A
Okay.
- [39:52]
C
The heart supposed to function. Right. Brain supposed to function, kidneys to function. Right. And if we can measure those functionalities carefully, then if you maintain function indefinitely, that is the longevity model.
- [40:05]
A
Yeah. I mean, right now we, we equate chronological age to a corresponding loss of function. And that's, that's what you're saying. We need to break that model because you can age chronologically, but you can actually maintain function and reverse poor function as well in your brain, in your muscles as well.
- [40:23]
C
Exactly. Well, function is. Function is the only thing that matters.
- [40:26]
A
Yes, absolutely.
- [40:27]
C
You can have a car. That's 1920s car. And if it's running.
- [40:31]
B
Yeah.
- [40:32]
C
You don't need to. The real goal is to forget your age.
- [40:35]
A
Yes. Forget.
- [40:37]
C
I can't remember. How old are you? I don't remember. I lost count.
- [40:39]
A
Doesn't matter.
- [40:39]
C
It doesn't matter. Like, you know, it's. Can I do the things I need to do?
- [40:42]
A
Yeah.
- [40:43]
C
And I, you know, to me, it's a. There's a three M's of a life worth living. It's mental acuity. You want to think.
- [40:48]
A
Right.
- [40:49]
C
You know, be able to interact with your world. Mobility. You need to be able to move, you know, and your mood. Like, you have to want to get up in the morning. You have a purpose. You have to. And so if you have a, if, if you can maintain a good mood and purpose in life. And that's how I tell people, never retire. Right. Retirement is basically putting a timestamp on your death. You're basically, okay, I'm going to just coast to death from here. So you should be. When you're 85, you should be thinking about your next career.
- [41:14]
B
Right.
- [41:14]
C
You think, okay, what's what's my next challenge?
- [41:16]
A
What am I doing next? Right, right.
- [41:18]
C
And that's. That's the mindset. Yeah.
- [41:20]
A
Because the three M's is a beautiful.
- [41:22]
C
Way to simplify it down simply, you know, if I. My mental acuity, my. My mood, my mobility, if I can have those three things, I'm okay, You're gonna be fine. I'm fine. And, you know, just focus on the things. But one of the biggest things we deal with, and doctor, yours is really good at this one, actually, you've interviewed her. Is on purposefulness.
- [41:39]
A
Yes.
- [41:40]
C
Understanding. Purpose.
- [41:41]
A
Okay.
- [41:42]
C
And that's the other part of chronological age, because we forget and people think, oh, stress is so bad. But stress is critical. We think, okay, I get, you know, you're going through high school. It's stressful. Right. You're. You're dating, you're trying to find, you know, what's going to make you attractive to whatever partner you want. And then you. You get a job because, you know, you have a relationship and so stressful to get a job. Then you have kids, and then there's the kids, have those relationships with them. And then. So you have these milestones in life.
- [42:08]
A
Sure.
- [42:08]
C
That you, that you work towards.
- [42:11]
A
Yeah.
- [42:11]
C
And those milestones create purpose.
- [42:13]
A
Right.
- [42:13]
C
The reason for you to get up in the morning, reason for you to work hard, work, strive hard. Right. And then people say, okay, now I'm 50 or 60 and I can quit.
- [42:21]
A
I'm done with purpose.
- [42:22]
C
Well, then you've lost your purpose.
- [42:23]
A
Absolute.
- [42:24]
C
Right. And that's. And it's really hard because people stop. It's. It's not easy because our. Our average life kind of creates purpose for us. Yeah. Like, we kind of have to have a purpose.
- [42:35]
A
Exactly.
- [42:36]
C
And then later on in life, you kind of have to make your purpose up.
- [42:38]
A
Yeah.
- [42:39]
C
Like, if you don't have one, make one up. Like, you know, and that's the biggest challenge as we get older. You know, your purpose in life just can't, you know, unless you want to be a professional golfer. But you can't be just, you know, you have to find something to keep you going. Right. And challenge yourself as you go forward on it. And those are the things that, you know, we do all these epidemiological trials where, you know, social connectivity and people getting out and they think, well, you know, if you're going to go out for coffee and bridge with your friends, well, you got to get dressed. Then you can have a decent meal and you can have a conversation. And so all those things that surround those Type of interactions are health promoting.
- [43:15]
A
Absolutely.
- [43:16]
C
And that's kind of what. So we kind of work on the biochemistry side.
- [43:19]
A
Yeah.
- [43:20]
C
Measurement side on the mri.
- [43:21]
A
Yes.
- [43:22]
C
And then on a community level, like, you know, get involved, enjoy your life.
- [43:27]
A
Exactly.
- [43:28]
C
Get engaged with people.
- [43:29]
A
Right.
- [43:30]
C
And then, you know, because it's, you know, we still are social animals, we have to have a, it's such a.
- [43:34]
A
Huge part of longevity. Right. Because even if you're biochemically very sound and you are, you're taking care of your, your biomarkers, what have you, all of that, if you lose that sense of purpose and community, you will still decline. Right. Because then you're going to get in a situation where you have loneliness and you're not learning anything and there's, and you've lost your purpose and all that adds up to a loss of the will to live, which then degrades your biology too. Right. So it's, it's definitely bi directional.
- [44:06]
C
Yeah. It's a circular.
- [44:08]
A
Circular, yes.
- [44:08]
C
For dementia patients, for example. Or you start losing function and then people don't want to, like they, they lose their hearing or they, they're not following conversations. Sure. And they become more withdrawn. And so when we, what we find when we're working with people with dementia and we bring people into our center in Canada, for example, and we start restoring their cognitive skills, they want to engage more.
- [44:27]
A
Absolutely. Right.
- [44:28]
C
And then that becomes self perpetuating and, and one of the things that deals with restoring health, you know, plasma. Probably the most rewarding thing about plasma allergies, if I have to say one thing at all, it's with children with autism, there's nothing more exciting because these children are kind of locked up. They're inside themselves. Right, right. And we do a lot of work with children with rare diseases, but these children, when they start interacting with their parents.
- [44:53]
A
Yeah.
- [44:54]
C
And they start, they start receiving things and their, their sense of humor starts coming out.
- [44:59]
A
Yeah.
- [45:00]
C
And they, they no longer, they, they no longer become isolated because the world becomes fun for them. And we can learn something from that because part of interacting, you and I interacting is like, it's kind of fun. Like.
- [45:11]
A
Yeah.
- [45:11]
C
What are you gonna ask me next? Right, right. And so even if you're a kid and you're teasing your sister, so, okay, if I say this, will she, you know, how do I, how do I interact with someone? Right. And so all this playfulness that we do in this world has to do with our learning capability. Yeah. And so building on these biochemical systems, they really do play a critical role Absolutely. And we're just doing a big launch in, in children with autism. We do, we, we do free programs with children and, and so on and so forth. But it's kind of. You can learn from different spectrums, right?
- [45:44]
A
Yes.
- [45:44]
C
You can look at these children and you say, well, similar things happen with old people or people with diseases. They get withdrawn.
- [45:50]
A
Right.
- [45:51]
C
And their health, their lack of health or the lack of vitality withdraws them from society. And so like you said, it's bi directional. Yeah, it's a circular, you know, and I'm always fairly agnostic. It's like, you know, I don't really care what it takes to get people healthy. If it works.
- [46:09]
A
If it works. Right. I mean, to your point, you know, loss of hearing is highly correlated to dementia and it's because of. I do think it's because you have less input and so less input, both from learning from being able to enjoy talking to other individuals and just being in social situations that leads to further and faster degradation of the. Of your brain.
- [46:31]
C
Right, exactly.
- [46:32]
A
And then you don't move around as much because you have nowhere to go. So then you become immobile and sedentary more. Which is very circular, Right?
- [46:41]
C
Exactly.
- [46:46]
A
This episode was also brought to you by vitaboom.
- [46:49]
B
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- [46:52]
A
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B
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- [47:25]
A
I don't have to bring 10 bottles of supplements with me and just open up a daily pack for every day that I'm taking my vitamins and supplements. Go to Vitaboom.com and check it out. You know, I wanted to make sure I asked you about before I forgot. Glia. Right. So we didn't cover that yet. And I think it's an incredibly important piece of the story that I want on my audience to miss out on. What are the microglia and how are plasmas important when you talk about these structures in your brain?
- [47:58]
C
Yeah, so, yeah, so we talked about lots of things. So from the practical perspective.
- [48:02]
A
Yes.
- [48:02]
C
So there's two things. So there's two different types of plasma precursors. First of all, we talked about you earlier on. You talked about the Omega 9.
- [48:09]
A
Right.
- [48:10]
C
For the myelination and the white matter.
- [48:11]
A
Right.
- [48:12]
C
And these are kind of protective, the calming. They reduce inflammation. People with adhd, they basically say, it's like putting reading glasses on my brain. You can read sentences again. They can feel good. And then the neuro is more of the volume. It pumps you up. Like you get better physical activity, better cognition. It's kind of a. It's a stimulating plasma.
- [48:34]
A
Is that omega?
- [48:35]
C
That's the Omega 3.
- [48:36]
A
Omega 3, right.
- [48:37]
C
With the DHA in it.
- [48:38]
A
Got it.
- [48:38]
C
And so microglia, which is. So we called proton glia because it works on white matter. But. But. And oligodendrocytes or other types of glial cells.
- [48:48]
A
Got it.
- [48:49]
C
But microglia people. When people mostly talk about microglia, they're talking about inflammation of the brain.
- [48:54]
A
Okay.
- [48:54]
C
Okay. And that is common so virtually every single neurological disease.
- [48:58]
A
Yeah.
- [48:58]
C
Whenever the brain is sick.
- [48:59]
A
Right.
- [49:00]
C
It's going to be inflamed. Right. And whenever it's inflamed, you're going to have activated microglia.
- [49:05]
A
Right.
- [49:05]
C
Because that's the brain's healing mechanism. Right. Basically, it's trying to solve a problem. Right. And. But this activated microglia is quite damaging to the brain. Chronic neural inflammation of the brain, which is what caused. Which is in autism, which is multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, dementia, doesn't matter.
- [49:22]
A
Right.
- [49:22]
C
And so one of the challenges now is the brain is kind of like a castle with a moat around it. It really has to fix itself from the inside. And this concussions are a good example.
- [49:32]
A
Okay.
- [49:32]
C
You get a concussion, the brain gets inflamed, and the blood supply is trying to help, but there's a limit to what the blood supply can actually deliver to the brain and how much the brain will let go of it. And so you get this chronic inflammation of the brain long term. And it consumes plasma allergens, it consumes other molecules, and it depletes the body. And so a lot of work has been done trying to reduce the inflammation of the brain as inflammation suppressants.
- [49:55]
A
Okay.
- [49:56]
C
And we kind of look at the microglia separately. It's. We have to ask the question, what is stimulating these microglia? Like, why are they becoming activated? And they normally become activated because of these membranes. We were talking about get oxygen oxidized. Just like rusty metal or peeling paint on the walls, it gets oxidized and the microglia kind of get attracted to those things. And we find that when we provide the plasma precursors, it dramatically reduces the inflammation because we fix these Cells from the inside out, and the inflammation goes down. And so that's kind of the key component. Mitochondrial health, mitochondrial support, plasmalogens. And then we can now measure with this advanced MRI the inflammation of the.
- [50:37]
A
Brain, which we never been able to measure.
- [50:38]
B
That too.
- [50:39]
C
Yes. So this NODI technology that I was telling you about, it measures three types of water in the brain.
- [50:44]
A
Okay.
- [50:44]
C
A little geeky here on you, but. So water that's inside the copper wire.
- [50:49]
A
Okay.
- [50:49]
C
Is one type is called neurite water.
- [50:51]
A
Okay.
- [50:51]
C
And then there's cell water that's in cell bodies, and then there's free water. And so the neurite water is your axon density, which is what you want. The cell water is inflammation water. Okay. So when you have especially white matter, you'll see, when we do our brain analysis, you'll see people with inflamed brain have a whole bunch of this cell bodies, which is microglia.
- [51:12]
A
Yep.
- [51:13]
C
And we find we now measure those going down. And so, for example, my brain had these high levels of inflamed space, and that inflammation went way down. Once we've been able to restore the inflammation of the brain, and then once the, once the inflammation of the brain goes down, the brain can start healing itself.
- [51:29]
A
Got it. Got it.
- [51:30]
C
It's like a. It's like being. Having the flu.
- [51:33]
A
Yeah.
- [51:33]
C
Right. Like, you know, when you get the flu, you're tired because your body's fighting an infection.
- [51:38]
B
Right.
- [51:38]
C
And it only has so much energy to go around. And so anyone who's done this before and you get the flu. So I'm going to work myself through it and say I'm going to go work out. Well, you just made your flu worse.
- [51:47]
A
Right.
- [51:48]
C
You tell people, you know, you can't, you know, you can't power your way through a flu, typically. Yeah. So give yourself some time to heal.
- [51:55]
A
Right.
- [51:55]
C
Otherwise you're going to make it worse.
- [51:56]
A
Right.
- [51:57]
C
And that's kind of what goes on with the brain.
- [51:58]
A
That's exactly what goes on with the brain. And so this prodrome glia, it's called, can help with that process as well. Again, up the inflammation, it's really focused.
- [52:07]
C
On the oligodendrocytes and the white matter, because that's really where the inflammation of the brain is. Inflammation is really a white matter in the white matter.
- [52:13]
A
I see. I mean, this MRI sounds incredible. I can't wait to have one done. So I'm going to hit you up for that because I love to see kind of my notice score and the amount of inflammation that's there. And I think that, you know, with. I think a lot of my patients, for example, they come in and we can test biomarkers for a lot of different things now. Right. Blood tests are becoming better and better, more and more ubiquitous, but the brain still remains a black box, unfortunately, because there are not a lot of biomarkers of brain health that we have until recently. Now we are doing some more biomarkers such as P Tau217 and, you know, amyloid ratios and GFAP. But these are all, I think, also disease markers that come kind of late in the stage. There's no real great biomarkers for the amount of brain health you have. Right. And so it sounds like this advanced MRI could really be helpful in that.
- [53:07]
C
And there is good. Like, those markers are great because they measured GFAP and neurofilament light change for axonal damage. So those are good markers to measure. They are kind of downstream, but still they're useful.
- [53:18]
A
Okay.
- [53:18]
C
And we can talk more about the, you know, methyl transfer system in the brain and so on and so forth, but there are very clear biochemical markers of brain health.
- [53:26]
A
Okay.
- [53:27]
C
So the plasmaogen levels in the brain. We published this years ago. We could predict cortical thinning based upon plasma deficiencies got in the blood. Your HDL levels are important for brain health. Keeping triglyceride levels low are important for brain health. Phosphatecholine levels in the blood are critical for brain health. And so we. So there's certain molecules that are definitely important to measure in the blood that are related to the fatty composition of the brain, because your brain is basically a bunch of. It's quite fatty.
- [53:57]
A
Right.
- [53:58]
C
And also peripheral markers of mitochondrial function are good markers of brain inflammation as well. And so there are like. So we do, you know, there are more advanced blood.
- [54:09]
A
So you can do blood tests for phosphatidylcholine levels.
- [54:12]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [54:12]
A
Yep. And do you do that in your laboratory? So can you tell me the name of the biomarker test that you do in your laboratory?
- [54:18]
C
So it's called Bioscan Bioscan. So we measure choline, plasmalogens, ethanolamine, plasmaogens, phosphocholines, and we measure the speciations of them. So we measure the omega 9s, omega 3 plasma in the choline pool, phosphocoline pool. We measure sphingomyelins and ceramides, which is an indicator of cellular breakdown. Really powerful is the lyso phosphatidylcholines.
- [54:42]
A
Okay.
- [54:42]
C
For cardiovascular health. So it's actually a very powerful Measurement of the turnover, breakdown of certain phosphate. So we can measure these things. And so the biochemical health that we look at core function, we look at mitochondrial function, peroxisomal function, your methyltransferry system. People may look at homocysteine levels, but it's important to look at your creatinine levels in context.
- [55:04]
A
Okay.
- [55:05]
C
And so. And your, your phosphocholine levels to your ethanolamine levels. So the biochemical health can really powerfully tell you like non alcoholic fatty liver disease issues. We can look at my, you know, inflammatory mark, like oxidative stress markers. Like we measure maldehyde and super oxidous mutase and a few things. And we organize that into such a fashion that we get a clear understanding of an individual's health state.
- [55:29]
A
Okay.
- [55:29]
C
And clear action. Okay. So you can take a look at, you know, the bioscan, you know, measures a lot of things, but in the end it identifies core components. And sometimes it's simple things that people, you know, sometimes we forget about the old biomarkers, which are really, really important.
- [55:46]
A
Right.
- [55:46]
C
Like keeping your triglyceride levels under 100.
- [55:49]
A
Yeah.
- [55:50]
C
You know, I can spend hours talking about cholesterol and our obsession with low cholesterol, which is not good for people.
- [55:56]
B
Right.
- [55:56]
C
You know, and these type of things. So, yeah, we kind of organize it all so that it's kind of an inescapable blood test.
- [56:02]
A
Got it.
- [56:02]
C
And so it's not about, you know, we kind of repurposed the diagnostic test. Creatinine is a good one.
- [56:08]
A
Sure.
- [56:09]
C
People measure creatinine because they want for.
- [56:10]
A
Kidney failure, kidney health. Right.
- [56:11]
C
But actually low creatinine is a much, much more dangerous situation.
- [56:14]
A
Really.
- [56:15]
C
Low creatinine means you have muscle wasting. So it's a measure of muscle mass. Yeah. And so people, you know, don't take enough creatine or phosphocoline in their diet. And so we can measure these things and change them. So that's what the bioscan does, looks at these complex lipids, which is you, you know, and then we add other core biochemical systems on top of that bioscan.
- [56:36]
A
And this is something that you have to give a full blood sample for. Is it a finger stick?
- [56:40]
C
A phlebotomy, A phlebotomy biobank. Everyone's blood samples forever.
- [56:44]
A
Oh, amazing. Okay, so how can someone get a bio scan?
- [56:47]
C
You can give us a call. Okay. Or you can our, our doctor network. We have about 3, 000 doctors in our network and get access to it. So there's Elite practitioners that have access to this, the full blown bioscan is there's a training program for our doctors to go through. But yeah, so the bioscan on your.
- [57:04]
A
Website, we can find a doctor that can do a bioscan and then they can submit a blood sample to your lab and you'll give all these results and then that will tell us kind of our disease, disease risk and state of health actually for liver, cardiovascular, brain, et cetera.
- [57:19]
C
Exactly. And then you get a pathway. So, you know, people, a lot of people in medicine, they use blood test as you take a blood test. And based upon the blood test, I treat to the blood test.
- [57:31]
A
Yeah.
- [57:31]
C
And we kind of do it the other way around.
- [57:32]
A
Right.
- [57:33]
C
Okay. We say we want to actually we're going to restore biochemical function and we use the blood test as a, as a gold star. You're doing a good job. So, you know, if we're doing these things, we should see your homocysteine levels normalized.
- [57:45]
A
We should see these things going.
- [57:47]
C
And so, so because some, sometimes people, you're going to want the symptomatic feeling that you're getting better, but you also want to be able to measure quantitatively, okay. The work that you're putting into it. The person's going to follow a protocol, do the things, and then you say, okay, I told you this is what's going to happen. This is what happened. Okay, you're on the right track. And then once you get yourself to a biochemically healthy state, then you say, okay, stick to, you got a program that works. Stick to your program. Okay. And it's long term longevity. Right. And so it's not. And people say, people often question me all the time, well, how long do I got to take these supplements? And I go, well, well, how long do you drink water? Like, how long do you, how long.
- [58:23]
A
Do you want to be healthy?
- [58:24]
C
Right. So it's kind of, you know, maintaining this, this healthy state. So. Yeah, so, so you know, the Dr. Goodnow Perpetual Health group, that is where, you know, we have the MRIs, we have bioscan large protocols for, you know, and do a lot of hand holding with navigation teams and so on and so forth. And then Prodrome is where we have our Dr. Networks and you can buy supplements a la carte@prodrome.com. like, you know, you can biohack yourself, you know.
- [58:51]
A
Right.
- [58:51]
C
And get education. There's that, you know, videos and so on and so forth. So it depends on the person's need. You know, some people need a lot of help. Yeah. And the people that need a lot of help, we're there to give them a lot of help. Those who want to do it themselves, they can do it themselves. And then, of course, we have these amazing network of doctors that have their own specialties. Sure. Okay. They're not, you know, they, they'll have peptides and exosomes and stem cells, and they'll do other things for people. And so we kind of want to make sure that the clients have access to the technology that they feel best suits their needs.
- [59:26]
A
Right.
- [59:26]
C
And then the doctors in our network have the tools. And so we plug our tools into their system and, you know, there's more than one way to get health.
- [59:36]
A
Right.
- [59:37]
C
Exactly. We're here working as a community.
- [59:39]
A
Yes.
- [59:40]
C
We plug in these advanced, you know, so for us, you know, these plasma allergy supplements, advanced blood testing, advanced mri, and then you kind of plug in other modalities, you know, as appropriate for your. Your, your patient or client, awesome as that may be.
- [59:54]
A
Yeah. So. And that's going back to what I said at the beginning. You've totally vertically integrated the solution here, too, to testing the supplements and the molecules. But also you have, you said you had inpatient centers as well, if you really need to go for a higher level of care. So you have an entire solution for people that are struggling. And also people can DIY it if they want to optimize as well.
- [60:17]
C
Yeah. So my goal as an industrialist and as a clinical trials expert and all that kind of stuff is to kind of create this consolidated centralization system. So all of our doctors, 3,000 and we get blood samples. Their samples are still in the freezer. So when we get a new tool, we can go back to an old blood sample and rerun it. Okay. So we say, why throw your blood samples away? Let's biobank the blood sample.
- [60:36]
A
Yeah.
- [60:36]
C
And then let's also look at building structure. So we can, we consolidate the blood sampling, like, so we can do other blood tests for people as well. And then the, you know, tracking of individual's health and, you know, like these MRI tools, those aren't available. So we're going to standardize it, make it available. And then what's important is that we, we. Everything we make available to doctors, we use ourselves.
- [61:00]
A
Yes.
- [61:00]
C
Like, it's not like, oh, here's a cool idea. Let's just market this thing. No, we only, we only do the things that we ourselves.
- [61:07]
A
Right.
- [61:07]
C
Would do, run in our own centers and clinics. And so then our clinical trial infrastructure. So we'll be starting running our Temecula program, we'll be having between 1 and 2000 patients in our trials at one point in time, so we can really properly validate this at full scale. And so all of our doctors get advantages of that so they can be part of that. Their patients can be part of trials if they want to be, like, just on the side, like, just like amazing look over the shoulders. Okay, what do you guys do? Okay, we'll do that. Okay. And as we're running the formal trials, they can run informal trials in their centers and track it available. So my job is just make things available, try to simplify the process and enable us to kind of, you know, continue to develop. Because as we, the more doctors I train with and the stories that come in and the different, different situations, we're just getting better and better at it and trying to consolidate that information. So especially the new doctors. Right. We're getting about 100 new doctors a month coming into our system. Right. And so they're brand new, like, just like this conversation. They don't know what plasma allergies are, they don't know what blood testing are. And so they want protocols, they want examples, case studies. And, and they say, okay, I got a patient like this. You know, is there. Who else has. Is there. Is there a similar patient story that I can work from? Because they're, the people are hungry. These, these tools now they've, they've got their formal training as a medical doctor or whatever system they're in, and they know their world. Okay. And they're getting certain levels of success doing what they're doing. Okay. And then. But it's overwhelming. It's a lot of technology, a lot of things. So they need. And so our job is to kind of, you know, get a step by step process and build a community. People.
- [62:46]
A
Sure.
- [62:47]
C
That can help each other through this.
- [62:49]
A
Yeah. I think also that, you know, going through standard medical school and training, whether it be neurology or, you know, gastroenterology and liver disease, whatever, have you, the number of tools you have work for a lot of things, but you're always hitting a wall. And so to have additional tools that you've provided is incredible for treating patients, but also there's a whole new world of optimizing your health so that we don't get disease in the first place and we just create the situation. Like you were saying in the beginning of this podcast, where potentially you just live in a state of health indefinitely. Right. And so just to know that this is a big piece of that, you know, we have hormones, we have peptides, we have stem cells, we have a lot of things. But plasmalogens is another big piece of that puzzle. And just to know that information is incredibly empowering, I think. And also adds, adds that whole puzzle that people are trying to put together right now.
- [63:45]
C
So, yeah, it's crazy because there's a lot of things that we intellectually know. Like, you know, you take an acetylcysteine because, you know, it restores your glutathione levels, but you don't feel it.
- [63:54]
A
No.
- [63:54]
C
Right. You take these plasmalogies, you take glia and you go to bed at night and you sleep through the night. Like you just feel like you fall through your bed. Right. Or you start taking the neuro and you feel sharper. Right. Your, your, your physical response time on your muscles are better. Your, you know, bright lights get brighter. Like so it's not, there's a, there's, you know, as a academic and kind of a little bit of a geek myself, like I can still intellectually say, oh, yes, I need my B vitamins, like thiamine is important, riboflavin. But you don't feel. Feel it.
- [64:24]
A
Right, exactly.
- [64:24]
C
And so plasmalogy is one of those molecules that you actually feel, feel it. It's a, it's a very interesting. Which is nice because then people start, oh, that works. Okay, now I'm going to listen a little more while you fix a few more things. Right, right. Because you want to get that first little. It's like when you work out the gym. If you go start working out and you work out for three months and you see nothing happen on your body, like you're not going to keep working out. Like you got to get to that first level. Level. You say, oh, oh, I'm seeing some muscle growth.
- [64:53]
A
Right.
- [64:54]
C
I think I'll go back to the gym again.
- [64:55]
A
Yeah, I know. You need to win.
- [64:56]
C
You need, yeah. You need to be able to, you need all the show. And it can't just be a theoretical win. Right. They have to kind of feel a win. Right, right. And then once you have that, then you kind of have them and then you can, and then, you know, you can kind of continue to build the health exact process.
- [65:10]
A
Well, this is, this is so educational for me. Thank you so much. And I'm sure the listeners learned so much from this episode of the podcast with you. And you know, there's a lot more to learn. So how can people find more information from you?
- [65:22]
C
So@drgoodnow.com is where there's a bunch of educational processes there, you know, talk about our programs. And there's the from there you'll see Perpetual health group or prodrome.com is where our doctor network is or supplements are available. There's information about the plasmaogens on any of those aspects of it. And then I do, you know, if you're, if you have a specific disease like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's, I do detailed lectures of dealing the biochemical basis of each of those diseases and so you get an understanding. I kind of teach people about their diseases in a way that is not normally presented. We'll talk about the underlying biochemistry and pathophysiology and where these things come from. And look at this. How do you restore health from these circumstances? So, so yeah, drgunow.com is the place to go. And then and prodrome.com would be the two places to start.
- [66:11]
A
Well, thank you so much for this time you spent with me and I can't wait to learn more from you. Thank you so much for being here.
- [66:17]
C
Thank you Dr. Ch.
- [66:21]
A
Dr. Goodenow is such an incredible scientist and wealth of information.
- [66:25]
B
Here are my top five takeaways from.
- [66:26]
A
That incredible episode with Dr. Goodenow.
- [66:29]
B
Number one, you don't just get a disease, you lose health. Every condition begins with measurable biochemical changes long before symptoms develop. Disease is the late stage of long detectable decline with specific biomarkers. Number two, Plasmalogens are core molecules that protect the brain, heart and immunity. They peak in midlife, then they decline low plasmology predict dementia, cancer vulnerability and all cause mortality and precursors may restore levels and even prevent disease onset. Number three, the brain can be repaired and tracked. New MRI software can quantify brain tissue thickness and function, allowing doctors to monitor cognitive restoration using plasmalogen therapy along with many other interventions. Number four, Longevity depends on the three M's, mental mood and mobility. Biochemistry matters, but without cognitive stimulation, emotional purpose and physical movement decline accelerates regardless of your molecular health. And finally, number five, chronic brain inflammation is a silent driver of aging. Microglial activation, low omega 3 to omega 9 plasmaogens and loss of sensory input like hearing loss, for example, contributes to deterioration of the brain. But these markers should be measured so we can improve them.
- [67:50]
A
If you found this episode helpful, please forward along to a friend or family.
- [67:54]
B
Member that needs to learn more about their brain and how to keep it healthy. Thanks for joining again for the Extend podcast.
- [68:04]
A
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today.
- [68:06]
B
Please remember to subscribe if you like.
- [68:08]
A
This episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts.
- [68:14]
B
I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking.
- [68:30]
A
Any action based on what you hear.
- [68:31]
B
Today, especially if you have any underlying.
- [68:34]
A
Health conditions or on any medications.
- [68:36]
B
Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.