← The Dr. Hyman Show
The Dr. Hyman Show
The Unexpected Dolphin Discovery That May Hold the Key to Longevity | Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson
01:12:55
Loading summary
Transcript217 lines
- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
- [00:03]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Numerous studies have consistently shown people with higher C15, just like we saw in the dolphins, lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, of heart disease, specifically coronary heart disease, of developing fatty liver disease and certain types of cancers, specifically a lot of work on colorectal cancer. Dr. Nick Schork, he was at ARDD, which is one of the world's leading anti aging therapeutics meetings. He said, listen, I've seen every longevity molecule under the sun and I have not seen a molecule that has more supportive data of being a longevity enhancing molecule than C15.
- [00:40]
Dr. Mark Hyman
At 65, I'm still pushing my limits, cycling long distances, trekking through Patagonia and living life to the fullest. But staying active as I age isn't just about willpower. It's about giving my body the vital support it deserves. See, as we get older, our mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells, naturally begin to slow down, stealing our energy and strength. That's where Timeline, powered by Mitopure, has truly been a life changer for me. It contains Urolithin A, which helps renew and recharge my mitochondria, keeping my muscles performing like they did when I was younger. Mitopure is backed by solid research showing it can boost cellular energy, increase muscle strength and support overall healthy aging. Personally, I take MyToPure every day. It's helped me keep up with my active lifestyle, whether it's a high intensity workout or an adventure in the mountains. So if you're looking to support your muscles and want to feel younger from the inside out, my friends at timeline are offering 10% off your first order. Ch it out@timeline.com doctor your future self will thank you. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there is simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you. If you're looking for data about your.
- [01:47]
Dr. Nick Schork
Biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights.
- [01:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And if you are in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hymenhive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website@drhyman. For a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.
- [02:08]
Dr. Nick Schork
Stephanie, it's great to have you back on the Dr. Hyman show and your work continues to astound me and discoveries that I think are going to hopefully make us all live a little bit longer, feel a little bit better, prevent some of the disease of aging. And we're talking about today the work you've done as a veterinary epidemiologist working with the Navy SEALs, I mean, the.
- [02:31]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Navy dolphins, we're going to help the Navy seals too.
- [02:35]
Dr. Nick Schork
I feel like a Navy SEAL right now. I'm like, I'm like trying to not shiver to death and I'm not in freezing cold water, but I'm wearing a thick coat because we're in Austin, Texas and it is freezing out with the windshield minus 12 degrees or something. So I'd love to start by having you sort of describe the sort of this incredible work you did with the Navy dolphins, which are used for kind of what are they used for? And then, and then what did you find as sort of you looked at the natural lifespan of dolphins compared to the dolphins in captivity. And how did that start to get you thinking about the sort of longevity aspect of what might be in the dolphins that you could discover and how did you begin to discover that?
- [03:18]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, boy, this is going to be exciting talk. I love the TF. Dr. Hyman, it's great to be here. It's always good to see you. So, yes, as a veterinary epidemiologist, I was wanted to track diseases. I read Lori Garrett's the Coming Plague when I was an undergraduate and said I want to do that. And I thought it was going to be infectious diseases. And it ends up that thanks to being recruited by the Navy to help lead their clinical research program with their dolphin population to help improve the lives of their dolphins, it quickly pivoted to chronic diseases and chronic diseases of aging. So it's been a.
- [03:56]
Dr. Nick Schork
If dolphins get chronic diseases of aging, this doesn't make any sense to me. Not eating McDonald's and they're not exercising and they're not doing their normal sleep routine and they don't, I mean, maybe they have more stress living in captivity, but.
- [04:09]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right. Well, that was the key question. Right. It really you hit the nail on the head that moved over to the Navy, ended up spending 20 years there, you know, 10 full years working with the Navy's dolphins with the pure goal of improving Navy dolphin health. So they live, Navy dolphins, they live in San Diego Bay, go out into the open ocean every day. Every day they choose to come back. So it's a pretty nice environment with regard to quality of life.
- [04:38]
Dr. Nick Schork
They just are free to go and then they come back.
- [04:39]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, it's pretty amazing, right? So they Live in the open ocean. That's their pod. So they choose to be there. And it meant a lot to me as a veterinarian. I didn't know how I'd feel.
- [04:50]
Dr. Nick Schork
I mean, also listening probably. Wait a minute. Why does the Navy have dolphins? Like, they're not Right.
- [04:56]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. So it ends up that they're really good at being able to find underwater objects that we can't see very well. And so they've done humanitarian demining missions in the Mediterranean where they're able to find buried mines, target it, they mark it, and then humans come in.
- [05:16]
Dr. Nick Schork
I think it's left over from World War II or whatever.
- [05:18]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right, exactly. So they have now made entire areas of the world safe, which is amazing. They can also find underwater swimmers, enemy swimmers, and be able to interdict and put a leg cuff on those swimmers, and they get reeled up by their human counterparts. So.
- [05:37]
Dr. Nick Schork
Wait, wait, you mean enemy scuba divers?
- [05:39]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, yeah. In case they were in nefarious areas, the Navy dolphins are there to help. So what they. For them, their job is easy peasy. Right. They have echolocation. They're able to do these things. And the program has been so successful being able to deploy the dolphins all over the world and have them stay right. That that has allowed. This program has been around for 60 years. They've had a sustained population of 100 bottlenose dolphins. So that has resulted in what we're talking about today with regard to this unprecedented patient population that gets older. Like you mentioned that in the wild, dolphins live to about 20. At the Navy, they're living into their 50s and even up to 60 years old.
- [06:27]
Dr. Nick Schork
So like two or three times as long.
- [06:31]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [06:31]
Dr. Nick Schork
In captivity as they do in the wild. Is that because there's predators or just it's more tough to get, get along out there?
- [06:37]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Great health care system, good preventative health care system, access to fish. The. You know, you watch any kind of wild animal show these days and that the world isn't. Isn't so friendly anymore for animals. It's getting harder and harder for wildlife.
- [06:54]
Dr. Nick Schork
Do you think. You think the wild dolphins, like a couple hundred years ago lived longer?
- [06:58]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's a good question. I do think there are things. There are studies that have shown that there were times that dolphins might have lived slightly longer, like maybe a few years, but nothing on the average like what we're seeing at the Navy. So. So there I was. Right. So taking care of this older geriatric dolphin population and what we started seeing, Mark, was an increase in that some of the dolphins were developing aging associated diseases like chronic inflammation, high cholesterol, fatty liver disease, and even the full suite of changes consistent with Alzheimer's. And what was really important was that some of the dolphins were developing these conditions, which has now culminated in what we now understand as a syndrome, that some dolphins were developing this and others were not. We were able to go in use metabolomics, which is this advanced technology to study thousands of small molecules in your blood. Yeah, exactly, in the blood. And we had this amazing archived inventory of dolphin serum, look at those molecules in their blood and in their all fish diet to find which small molecules predicted the healthiest aging Dolphins. We expected Omega 3s to be at the tip top of the list. And Instead it was C15, which none of us even knew what C15 was. But pentadecinoic acid was the top predictor of healthy aging dolphins. So that was 10 years ago. And what started the next 10 years of research now, over 100 papers on C15.
- [08:36]
Dr. Nick Schork
That's incredible. So basically this is. C15 is A. The number 15 is really about where the carbons and the bonds are on the, on the chain of fatty acids. And it's a saturated fat, which in most people's mind think is bad, but it's actually not. It's actually turns out to be very powerful and have many effects on many of the longevity pathways. And, and there's a lot of molecules that are being studied for longevity, Everything from rapamycin to metformin to nad, and the list goes on ax, you know, astaxanthin. I mean there's a lot of interesting molecules that are being used. How, how does C15 stack up against some of these? What is the sort of the research that's been done today to help to look at what it does? How does it actually facilitate longevity? Because it's just a fatty acid. So you wouldn't think, how is it doing all these things?
- [09:29]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right, right, right. So the first important discovery that we made, and this was alongside Dr. Ed Dennis, who's a leader in fatty acids. So he was the editor in chief for the journal for lipid research for when we first made the discovery of C15 association. Right. Because in the dolphins this was just association with better health. We went to Dr. Dennis, to Ed and shared our hypothesis. And Ed was like, well, chances are this isn't going to pan out because we've known about C15 since the 1950s and chances are that stuff, no offense, that a dolphin veterinarian didn't discover something new about fatty acids. And he's like, but it's intriguing about the dolphins. So we spent the next three years doing eight studies to show that C15 not only has direct benefits and is a beneficial saturated fat, like you shared, but that it meets these rare criteria of being an essential fatty acid. The first essential fatty acid to be discovered in over 90 years.
- [10:38]
Dr. Nick Schork
What makes something an essential fatty acid? Because we think of these things as essential for life, and if we don't have them, you're going to be in trouble. Like, there's essential amino acids, fatty acids. By the way, everybody, there's no such thing as essential carbohydrates.
- [10:50]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Good point, good point. Dang it.
- [10:52]
Dr. Nick Schork
But what makes it essential and how do we have to think differently about it?
- [10:58]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yes. So what we've learned is that our bodies require a certain amount of C15 in our bodies, including in our cell membrane. It's a sturdy saturated fat. That is because it's an odd chain. Saturated fatty acid has an odd number of car anti inflammatory properties. We'll talk about all the different mechanisms that C15 has. So it's really this Goldilocks healthy fatty acid that is essential to maintaining the stability of our cells. If we don't have enough C15, specifically, at least 0.2% of fatty acids are C15 in our cell membrane. Our cells become fragile and we develop a nutritional deficiency syndrome, which we published last year in MET metabolites called cellular fragility syndrome, the first deficiency syndrome to be discovered in 75 years. Which leads to, you know, we can talk about this whole new form of cell death called phoroptosis. So it's been, you know, and accelerated.
- [12:03]
Dr. Nick Schork
Someone has fragile cells, what does that mean? What are the consequences? How do they feel?
- [12:07]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right. So if you have fragile cells, your cells basically start falling apart, which is what happens when we age. So a lot of aging related breakdown that we feel, our aching knees, our foggy BR metabolism, increased inflammation, all of those things come with more fragile cells, which leads to, if we nerd out a little bit, leads to lipid peroxidation. There's this abnormal iron sitting inside the cell. They combine and they cause this increase like explosion of reactive oxygen species that take out the cell. So when that happens, our whole bodies get affected from our immunity to our metabolism. So it ends up that While this process, C15 deficiencies can accelerate our aging and everything that we feel with aging, we've now been able to work with the Navy and look at how can we optimize C15 to flip the story and how can we actually optimize our longevity through C15.
- [13:10]
Dr. Nick Schork
So you talk also you wrote a book actually, just quite good. It's called Longevity Nutrient, and the full title is the Unexpected Fat that Holds the Key to Healthy Aging. So it's kind of good title that got my attention. I actually have been measuring fatty acids in my patients for decades and decades. And you know, I'd always see C15, but it didn't really register as something that was important to look at.
- [13:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And now I look at it every.
- [13:36]
Dr. Nick Schork
Time and I'm surprised to see how many people are actually quite low with C15, which comes from dairy products. Right. And from fatty fish.
- [13:45]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. That's right. And so now we're seeing that as many as one in three people are C15 deficient. And then there are some that are extremely C15 deficient. Right. Which you'll see on your test. And it's exactly for that reason we have taken C15 out of our diets globally. So our primary source, Mark, like you just shared, is dairy fat by far. And we're not saying go back and eat a bunch of dairy fat. 1% of dairy fats is C15. Over 40% of the fatty acids in dairy fat are pro inflammatory saturated fat. So we still need to work our way through that. That. But the Navy was interested enough to say, hey, can we find a way to use C15 and leverage it for longevity? Meanwhile, let's also talk about the need to prevent these, you know, deficiency syndrome that's showing up in our kids. And that might just be by helping to get milk fat back into kids diets. Including mom's milk fat.
- [14:48]
Dr. Nick Schork
Yeah. Breast milk for sure. Although conventional dairy has a lot of problems and it's very inflammatory for a lot of people.
- [14:55]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [14:56]
Dr. Nick Schork
I wonder if it's high levels in goat or sheep. Is it?
- [14:59]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
It's a good question. So what the studies have Learned is that C15 levels are driven by what the ruminant. So it could be a cow, a goat, sheep, whatever, what you're eating, what they eat. Yeah. So if you feed either a cow, goat, or sheep grass, it has twice as much C15 in its dairy fat than fed corn. If you feed it high altitude, GR has even higher C15. So we don't know when you go buy your dairy product what that animal was eating. And so one thing that we're pushing for is to have the Dairy Industry report C15 levels in their foods and to help change industry practices to help maximize C15 levels.
- [15:44]
Dr. Nick Schork
Interesting. Yeah. So it's not, you're not what you eat, you're what you ever. You're eating. 8.
- [15:50]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right, you've got that. Yeah.
- [15:52]
Dr. Nick Schork
Now let's get into some of the sort of the, the, I mean the discovery of. It's fascinating. So you've had this like trove of blood from dolphins for decades. And they can go back and check like, okay, who are the dolphins that age fast, who are the ones that age much slow, more slowly? And then you kind of looked at all of them and then rose to the top were with C15. But you mentioned there's like 100 other molecules you're looking at that that may have promising benefits too that we haven't looked at. And that's the beauty of sort of modern science. For those listening, we really have gotten the ability to look at not just you know, 20 blood tests or at function, we do 110. And there's now ways to do metabolomics which looks at thousands and thousands of molecules that are floating around in your blood that have meaning and that do things, but that often we've kind of neglected or ignored. And this is clearly one of them. And in terms of this seven sort of longevity enablers, you talk about fatty 15 or which is the sort of brand of the product C15 which you can now actually buy. And I personally take it every day is because the science was so compelling to me that I was like, okay, well this is, you know, if it doesn't work, you know, okay, but if I'm missing something it's going to be a big deal. So I want to take it. What are these sort of seven you call it must haves of a longevity enabler that this, this, this molecule meets.
- [17:11]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. So there are, we have established these seven must haves. And by we I mean the longevity scientific community. This was also put together in part with Dr. Nicholas Schork who is the head of NIH's longevity consortium. And so Nick was really interested in the dolphin angle because he's like, wait, you've got a long lived species that, that has clean data. So let's work through that to make these discoveries. And when we get to these longevity must haves, we're now able to, you know, a lot of longevity research is on short lived species of how do we help mice and worms live longer. Right.
- [17:54]
Dr. Nick Schork
And it's like good at making worms live to be like a thousand years.
- [17:57]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Old and it doesn't really translate. Right.
- [18:00]
Dr. Nick Schork
And mice, you know, to be like 120.
- [18:02]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So you know, Nick Really, Nick and I really came in and we're like, oh my gosh, we have this incredible opportunity. Nature's already figured it out, right Marc? I mean nature's already figured out how a mammal can live 27, 30 times longer because humans and dolphins and elephants live a lot longer than a mouse. So why. So let's figure out how evolution has already enabled massive longevity, enabling tap into that and then make it even better.
- [18:29]
Dr. Nick Schork
Some of the bowhead whales of like 200 years, right.
- [18:32]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So it's just like how, let's look at, let's focus on these species. Not to dismiss the short term, the basic science, but it's an unlock, right? So the seven must haves of longevity and this is assuming that longevity, the way we define it is as a geroprotector. So a molecule that slows our aging rate and therefore slows the onset of the chronic diseases that kill us.
- [18:57]
Dr. Nick Schork
You may not actually live longer, but.
- [18:59]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
You'Ll live healthier, healthier and then by default be able to extend your own longevity so that you can live longer. So of those, the 7 longevity must haves are. First, it needs to. This molecule needs to tap into the longevity regulating pathway. It's this complicated keg, it's called the keg pathway and it's based upon of hypocaloric diet. So caloric restriction and the whole pathway that's been built out on how caloric restriction extends longevity across multiple species. At the heart of it is activating AMPK and inhibiting MTOR which as you had mentioned, metformin activates AMPK and rapamycin inhibits MTOR, C15 does both. So that was really exciting to see. It's really hitting at the heart as other longevity molecules.
- [19:55]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Did you know that staying hydrated isn't just about drinking water, it's about replacing both water and electrolytes. Here's the thing, when you sweat, you're losing water and sodium and if you're only drinking water without replacing those electrolytes, you're missing a key part of hydration. In fact, over drinking plain water can actually dilute your blood sodium levels, leaving you feeling off think muscle cramps, headaches or dips in energy. That's why I'm such a big fan of element. It's a science backed electrolyte drink that gives you the right amounts of sodium, potassium and magnesium to help you stay hydrated and perform at your best. When I rode my bike all over Greece, element was a game changer. It kept me energized, clear headed and feeling great. And the best part? Element has zero sugar, no artificial colors, and none of those dodgy ingredients you'll find in most electrolyte drinks. Plus, the flavors are incredible. Whether it's watermelon salt, grapefruit salt, orange salt, or one of their other options, there's something for everyone. Right now, Element is offering my listeners 8 single serving packets for free with any order. It's a great way to try it out. Just go to drinkelement.com hyman to grab yours. Trust me, your body will thank you. When I'm with my patients, I see how busy lives can make it difficult to prioritize our own wellness. Balancing work, family and personal health can leave little time for appointments, and yet we all need ways to support our energy, muscle recovery and overall well being in sustainable, practical ways. That's why I'm impressed by Bon Charge's Max Red Light Therapy device. Red Light Therapy is a non invasive approach that uses specific wavelengths of red and near infrared light to penetrate deep into the skin. Just a few minutes a day with Bon Charge's device can help boost energy, enhance skin health and support faster recovery. Perfect for those of us who need effective solutions at home. With regular use, I've noticed less muscle tightness, better sleep and more vibrant skin. This tool has become part of my routine even during a quick meditation or while winding down in the evening, allowing me to wake up refreshed without middle of the night wake ups or afternoon dips. Bon Charge's devices are easy to incorporate with the quality and effectiveness that busy people need. They ship worldwide, have easy returns and come with a one year warranty. To try it yourself, visit boncharge.com and use code Dr. Mark for 15% off. That's B O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com code Dr. Mark for 15% off mouth if you've heard me speak recently, you probably know how much I love Himalayan Tartery Buckwheat. A gluten free seed loaded with longevity promoting nutrients. My good friends at Big Bold Health have been carefully growing and researching this ancient plant for years. After tons of positive feedback from me and their thousands of customers, they've produced the world's first 100% organic Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat Sprouted powder that's easier to digest, richer in vitamins and minerals, and contains up to 10 times more plant nutrients like rutin and Quercetin. I love this as a topper in my yogurt. A sprinkle on savory meals or an easy add to my smoothies and protein shakes, the sprout powder has no fillers, additives, or sugars and is farmed, sprouted, and packaged in the usa. Right now, Big Bold Health is offering my listeners a special offer of 30% off this amazing product. You can try it now by heading to bigbold health.com and use code Dr. Mark 30. Again, that's big-bold-health.com.
- [22:57]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
The second is that it needs to target and just to.
- [23:01]
Dr. Nick Schork
Back up on that, might not understand that. So AMPK regulates a lot of things. Inflammation, your blood sugar, control your mitochondrial function. And it interacts with a lot of other longevity pathways. I call them longevity switches, like the four longevity switches that I wrote about, about sort of in my book Young Forever, which is, you know, mtor, which regulates protein synthesis, and also when you inhibit, it causes autophagy, which is cellular cleanup, which is really important to healthy aging. Insulin signaling, which we can talk about. And that causes us to kind of overproduce insulin and leads to obesity and diabetes and Alzheimer's and cancer and pretty much everything else. And then, and then there's the pathway called sirtuins, which is very involved in regulating DNA repair and oxidative stress. And a lot of them have overlapping redundancies in terms of the key fundamental things of aging which we talk about in the hallmarks of aging, whether it's mitochondrial dysfunction, whether it's autophagy, cellular cleanup, whether it's inflammation, oxidative stress, blood sugar regulation, protein synthesis. So all those things are necessary, and they're fundamental to understand because they're the.
- [24:13]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Things that underlie all disease.
- [24:15]
Dr. Nick Schork
And what people don't realize is now we're discovering these new frameworks for understanding disease that are based on root causes. And so the hallmarks of aging are really discoveries that have helped us map out what are those things that tend to go wrong as we get older. And now we can think about how do we treat those. And if we treated those, we might extend life by a third, rather than just if we got rid of cancer and heart disease would extend life by five to seven years. We completely eradicate it from the planet. So that's not much of a life extension compared to 30.
- [24:46]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [24:48]
Dr. Nick Schork
So they're really important to understand. But there's also causes of dysfunction, which I think doesn't get addressed, like, why do we have these dysfunctions? But C15 seems to work on some of these key pathways around the hallmarks of aging.
- [25:00]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. That's right. Thank you. For that. And your book, by the way, does a great job explaining all of those.
- [25:06]
Dr. Nick Schork
Hard to explain. Trust me.
- [25:07]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
If anyone wants to dive in more, please, Young Forever.
- [25:09]
Dr. Nick Schork
Please read it.
- [25:10]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Please read, please read your book Young Forever. So then the second one exactly feeds into the hallmarks of Aging. There's 12. The list keeps getting longer, it feels like every couple of years. Yeah. So there's now multiple studies showing that C15 targets six of them. And that includes helping C15 directly repairs mitochondrial function. It has the skip function where it's able to help restore broken mitochondria by enabling it to make energy when normally it wouldn't be able to, which is exciting and important. It helps with poor cellular signaling. We know that it not only activates AMPK and inhibits MTOR, but it also activates PPAR, Alpha Delta and AKT, and it inhibits JAK STAT and HDAC 6. So that was a bunch of letters.
- [26:09]
Dr. Nick Schork
What she's saying basically in English is that these are other pathways that we all have have that regulate inflammation, that regulate blood sugar and that, that when we look at actually the things that drive aging, it's dysregulation of blood sugar and insulin and inflammation that is a consequence of that. And the downstream effects is it harms our mitochondria, it causes more oxidative stress. It, it has so many awful effects on inhibiting autophagy and causing stem cell exhaustion and shortening telomeres and all the things that I talk about in my book. So, you know, when you, when you kind of get to the kingpin of what's going on for most of us as we age and what's so curious about these long lived dolphins is that they, they had this protective molecule that they seem to accumulate. Now what I don't understand is if all the dolphins were eating the same stuff and all of them had the same environment, like why were some actually having high levels of C15 and others. It's some genetic component here that we don't understand, or there's some variability and how people, you know, keep or utilize it or absorb it. What explains that?
- [27:15]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right, so with the dolphins it was pretty, it ended up being pretty straightforward. So they have an option of five different fish types and, or they might be fed different fish types based upon what their job is at the Navy. So if they're doing a job in which they're going through, you know, training of learning how to find an object, for example, they might get a bunch of low fat fish that they get kind of, of, you know, Given throughout the whole day, it ends up that those low fat fish had no C15 in them. And what we were able to get to, remarkably, because the Navy's vigilant data collection, we were able to see that some dolphins were getting a higher C15 diet than other dolphins. And then even better, we did two Navy funded studies in which we gave those dolphins with lower C15 a higher C15 fish diet. And we saw that their aging related conditions reverse. That's amazing. Right? So then we were like, oh, okay.
- [28:15]
Dr. Nick Schork
Now that's how you test hypothesis, right? You see, oh, well, it's associated with longevity, but it's a causal.
- [28:21]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [28:21]
Dr. Nick Schork
When you add the molecule into the diet through fatty fish, it actually reverses the things that you saw as consequences of aging.
- [28:29]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. We saw complete reversal of anemia.
- [28:31]
Dr. Nick Schork
If you give the fish, if the dolphin herring, that's good, but if you give them like, like flounder, probably not so good, right?
- [28:36]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, that's right. It was not like a common food that we eat, but it was like capelin and squid. Squid had no C15 in it. But you're right, herring was a great. And mackerel were great fish. So that's how it led to all of those. So then with the hallmarks of aging, it targets six of them. It helps with, we now understand from a clinical trial, it helps with gut dysbiosis.
- [28:58]
Dr. Nick Schork
How does it do that?
- [28:59]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right, so C15 multiple ways. A lot of exciting research coming out on C15 for gut health. Not from us, from other teams around the world. They've shown, multiple studies have shown that in multiple mouse models of colitis of IBD with regard to leaky gut syndrome, that C15 specifically helps improve the gut lining and it stops the leakiness. So it decreases inflammation and it stops the leakiness.
- [29:29]
Dr. Nick Schork
Is it because it sort of embeds itself in cell membranes in the gut, that's it becomes more stable and less fragile. Is that the kind of hypothesis?
- [29:37]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's the hypothesis. We know that it gets in there, we know that it has this effect and so it helps with that. In addition, really fascinating work on the microbiome that in a clinical trial that was done in Singapore with C15 supplementation showed that women who had a history of fatty liver disease when they took C15, they saw an improvement in the growth of Bifidobacterium adolescentis, which is like a mama microbe that's really good at helping to regulate our metabolism. It's also been shown to extend longevity in worms. So we already talked about the limitation of that, but it was an interesting side point.
- [30:18]
Dr. Nick Schork
I knew that worms have a microbiome.
- [30:20]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Exactly.
- [30:21]
Dr. Nick Schork
Worm poop.
- [30:22]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
It lowered in that clinical trial. It also lowered LDL cholesterol, which was great. And then there are other studies showing that we know that fiber can help improve metabolism. And so there was a whole series of studies that was done to figure out how fiber helps. It ends up that there's a molecule in fiber called inulin, not to be confused with insulin. And inulin is being fed to our gut microbes that then use inulin to make C15. And so it's because of the C15 that's being made by the microbes that helped explain the benefits of fiber. So it's just, like, interesting.
- [31:04]
Dr. Nick Schork
So basically, you don't have to eat any fish or dairy. If you have enough of the right fiber and prebiotics, you can grow the right bugs in your gut, and they'll produce C15 for you.
- [31:15]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
It'll get you to. It's like an additive. It's kind of like how to. What are all the different tips and things we can do to maximize our C15? So that is one component. If none of the single things alone can do it. But additively, I mean, it's interesting.
- [31:29]
Dr. Nick Schork
We've been measuring fatty acids on our patients at the Ultra Wellness center, my practice in Lenox, Massachusetts, for 20 years. And before that at Canyon Ranch, we also did for another 10 years. And it would be interesting to go back and see, okay, who has low levels of C15. Because it wasn't something I was really paying that much attention to. And now I paid very close attention to it. And I'm like, oh, wow, this one's low. You're low, you're low, you're low, you're low. So it's an important biomarker for actually understanding how people are navigating their health journey and longevity and aging itself. So really quite amazing. So we were kind of going through the seven longevity must haves we went through.
- [32:15]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So we got through the first two, which are the biggest. So in addition to targeting the longevity pathway, human pathway regulating pathway, it also targets key hallmarks of aging. It needs to show the third is it needs to show evidence of slowing the rate at which we age. And that's usually we talk about Navy seals, right? So if this was a Navy SEAL course, this is where most longevity molecules would be, not make the cut and drop out of the competition. So we did, Nick Schwarg and I, we did a study showing Dolphins that showing what hadn't yet been proven before, which is if you take individuals within the same population, that there will be some that age at different rates despite having a relatively controlled environment. And it was crystal clear in the dolphins that we had fast aging and slow aging dolphins. It ends up the aging rate biomarker for that was hemoglobin. And that had to do with again, fragile cells in which they were increasingly losing red blood cell health over time. One measurement of that is called red blood cell distribution with or rdw, which has become. See, there you go. A really popular way of understanding aging rate is rdw. So we saw that crystal clear in the dolphins.
- [33:41]
Dr. Nick Schork
Yeah, it's interesting actually. RDW is one of the biomarkers that's used to kind of calculate your biological age that we use at function health.
- [33:50]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah.
- [33:50]
Dr. Nick Schork
Which is based on epigenetic testing and correlating that with certain blood biomarkers. And that's how we come up with function health of a biomarker. So be interesting to be able to start to test fatty 15 as part of our functional panel. But it's, it's really, it seems like such an essential molecule. The, the fact that it's quote, essential, you know, is, is that, is that something that's been established by the scientific community? Is that something they use for. Have figured out or.
- [34:16]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right. That's a pretty bold claim. So we put the stake.
- [34:20]
Dr. Nick Schork
It's like discovering a new vitamin that's essential for health. It's a big deal. It hasn't been new one in like 70 years or something. Right.
- [34:28]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
It's been a long time. Exactly. So we've hit the stake at the ground back in 2020 and we published that in Nature's scientific reports. This last year has been really exciting, Mark, with there have been now to date three other independent teams that have evaluated C15 as meeting the criteria of essentiality, all using different methods of gold standard methods of looking at pregnant mice and saying, hey, if you make the mom C15 deficient, does her neonate show evidence of a nutritional deficiency? And the answer was yes. And when you give it just C15 does a nutritional deficiency, is it fixed? And the answer was yes.
- [35:14]
Dr. Nick Schork
And so like an infant mice, what are the symptoms of nutritional deficiency?
- [35:18]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Poor growth and poor neural development. It ends up that epidemiologically we're seeing the same trend, disturbingly in humans, that if mom has lower C15 levels, her baby gets lower C15 and lower C15. Now is. Has been associated with poor body growth, poor brain development, even up to cognitive development of kids up to six years old. But the upside, right, the hope in all of this is that nutritional deficiencies and essential fatty acids, these are fixable. So now we have with regard to essentiality, Another study she had again with worms, showed that if you deprived a baby worm of all nutrients, right, it goes into this, it doesn't die, it goes into this like slumber state. And they show that if you give it just C15, it will regrow as if you were feeding it a full nutritious diet. So walking through, and then another group looked at all the wealth of human data today. And so all of these papers came out just this last year. Again reconnoiter of re validating that C15 meets the criteria of essential fatty acid, including the discovery of a nutritional deficiency like vitamin C and scurvy and vitamin D and rickets.
- [36:42]
Dr. Nick Schork
So what has been the human data? I mean we talked about worms, dolphins, what's the human data on C15 and how does it stack up against, for example, other longevity molecules? Because NIH has a program to study various compounds and looking at, you know, rapamycin or metformin or astaxanthin or acarbose, which most of these are drugs and you know, there's not a lot that actually show significant benefit. Rapamycin is probably the most promising, but it has significant side effects. And there's coming up with analogs that are without the side effects that only affect one of the pathways of mtor. But that's way too complicated for me to understand. But tell me, how does this sort of stack up in that lineup?
- [37:30]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yep. So we'll start with human cell systems. Cause it's hard to do the long term studies to show, hey, if you take this molecule, will you live longer? And to your like a randomized control.
- [37:43]
Dr. Nick Schork
Trial for 50 years to see if it happens.
- [37:45]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those are underway, which is good. But they change, just take time and they get really complicated. So again, working with Dr. Schork, one way we looked at that was to say, okay, we use this panel called biomap and there are human cell systems, 12 different human cell systems that are mimicking various disease states. And it has a bunch 148 different biomarkers. And what you do is you treat these different cell systems, disease systems, with different doses, like ascending doses of C15 of rapamycin, metformin, acarbose. And what we showed was that C15 had the most cellular clinically relevant benefits that are longevity enhancing compared to rapamycin, metformin and a carbose. It was really close to, it was most close to rapamycin, which is exciting for the Longevity consortium. Right. They really leaned into side effects without the side effects. I mean this, this is a molecule that every mammal gets at birth. And then when you look, you step back a little bit and you look at the activities, the things we care about. C15 is anti inflammatory, it has an antioxidant, it has anti cancer functions, it has antimicrobial, it even stops the growth of pathogenic bacteria and fungi. And you look at that kind of wonky list of benefits and that's what rapamycin does. So it just means that maybe we didn't have to go to Easter island to discover rapamycin in San Diego to the Navy dolphin. And it was like mom's milk, you know, it's like, thank you mom. You know.
- [39:30]
Dr. Nick Schork
How do you get breast milk though? You can't get that easily.
- [39:32]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, we don't want to. And no other mammal continues to eat dairy after the initial growth. So it's again, it's like how do we leverage this molecule in our later years?
- [39:42]
Dr. Nick Schork
That's a good point. How do other mammals who are not eating fish, you've got bears who eat fish, you've got certain other mammals that might eat fish, like otters or seals, whatever, but most land living mammals like elk or deer don't eat fish. How do they get C50 and they're.
- [40:07]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Not eating dairy, no ice cream, no cheese, anything like that? That is, there are plant based forms and there haven't been a lot of studies yet to understand what are the different C15 sources. Because now that we understand C15's essentiality really expands to the animal kingdom as far as we know it, of how different animals get it. But it could be part of micro like cows make it. Right. So they eat grass and their rumen is able to their bacteria to produce. So it may be a combination based upon on the species how well their microbes are able to make it from the food versus how much they get from the food directly.
- [40:50]
Dr. Nick Schork
So if you like regeneratively raised cows, they're going to be eating more variety of wild grasses and plants, they might have more.
- [40:57]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [40:57]
Dr. Nick Schork
If you're eating sheep or goat, they typically don't feed them corn and soy.
- [41:01]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [41:02]
Dr. Nick Schork
So they may have more and it's often better tolerated because they have a different form of casein, which is the protein and milk that tends to cause problems. And most cows are bred to have a one casein which is really problematic and inflammatory for most people. So there are a two cows like Jersey cows and Guernsey cows and there are a two cows, heirloom cows. But you know, I think what I'm curious about is how, how this molecule also can be a therapeutic molecule, not just sort of a preventive molecule that, that deals with some of these basic mechanisms. But how, how could it affect your treatment of diabetes or heart disease or fatty liver disease?
- [41:41]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
How did that work? And that's where it gets to conveniently, longevity molecule must have never. What are we on four clinically relevant benefits within months. If a molecule says, hey, we target these mechanisms of longevity, but you're not really going to see anything but you'll live longer. That doesn't for Nick and I, that just is not what we were looking for. We're looking for to say can C15 actually have meaningful benefits specifically with people with diseases. So again, caveating that as a supplement. Supplements aren't intended to treat or prevent or to treat diseases. But we're talking about the studies that have been done to date and what we're seeing that you know, we need C15 and putting C15 back into our system and optimizing those levels. We are seeing disease treating effects. And this is both in people. So let's take for example a clinical trial with Dr. Jeff Schwimmer. Fatty liver disease. Right. So that didn't exist. Non alcoholic fatty liver disease are now masled.
- [42:46]
Dr. Nick Schork
They changed the name because you need to only see this. Fatty liver issues in alcoholics.
- [42:53]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right.
- [42:53]
Dr. Nick Schork
And now the most prevalent form is those with metabolic dysfunction, meaning diabetes pre diabetes. And they call it metabolic associated fatty liver disease.
- [43:04]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Maybe us docs inside, I just shouldn't be involved in branding a disease name.
- [43:08]
Dr. Nick Schork
So NAFLD as opposed to nafld.
- [43:11]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So there you go. So I'll call it fatty liver disease not associated with alcohol. So that wasn't known until Mayo Clinic published a paper in 1980 for the first 20 cases. So since then we move fast forward to today. The latest paper showed 38% of people globally have fatty liver disease. So this has been a alarming rise in people with fatty liver disease, a percentage of which are progressed to steatohepatitis, inflammation, cirrhosis, becoming one of the leading causes of liver transplants and liver cancer.
- [43:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
This is important.
- [43:50]
Dr. Nick Schork
What you said was really important because about 1 in 10 or less, the 1 in 9 now keeps getting worse in America have diabetes, type 2 diabetes. But what you're saying is 4 in 10, almost 4 in 10 have fatty liver disease. Even if you don't have diabetes, it still increases your risk of heart attacks, cancer, stroke, rapid aging and death.
- [44:11]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. Now none of the. We don't want any, any of the.
- [44:13]
Dr. Nick Schork
Even if you don't have diabetes.
- [44:15]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. That's right.
- [44:16]
Dr. Nick Schork
So it's important. And it's often not diagnosed, it's often missed. There are now really great blood tests you can do to find out if you have it. Not just your regular liver function tests. And we offer these as part of function health testing. So you can go to functionhealth.com mark and actually get these tests as add on tests to the basic function panel that look at fibrosis and liver and are really helpful to kind of pick up people who have this. Because you don't want to continue to have this if you have it. I mean, you can diagnose it through an MRI or, you know, various kinds of fancy testing, but to a simple blood test, you can also kind of get a pretty good idea. And it's important to understand because this is unsilent epidemic and nobody ever heard of. And it doesn't really have a ton of symptoms other than, you know, maybe you're overweight and maybe you got a big belly or maybe like. But, but it just, it's, it's quite important. And so what you're saying is that C15 has the potential to impact fatty liver disease.
- [45:14]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Exactly. And so when Jeff Schwemmer is a leader in pediatric fatty liver disease and he opened the first clinic for fatty liver disease for kids. And so Jeff, back in 2012, I had published a paper on fatty liver disease in dolphins. And he wrote me, he sent me an email and he's like, it's probably not what we're seeing in people. It's probably not the same disease, but send me some liver slides that you have and let me get back to you.
- [45:45]
Dr. Nick Schork
So I said, no, these were dolphins who died. And then you found it.
- [45:48]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Exactly. Dolphins who had. Yeah, exactly. And then afterward we had found you're.
- [45:52]
Dr. Nick Schork
Not like sacrificing dolphins to get like they do mice.
- [45:56]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Thank you for that clarification. Yeah, we're actually able to go back and look at pathophysiology reports of dolphins that had passed. So we had this. That was another amazing archive. Right. Of information. So. So we were able to send those slides to Jeff. And then a couple weeks later, Mark, I got an email and the title was we are. I'll go. He's like, this is the exact same presentation of fatty liver disease that you're seeing in dolphins that I'm seeing in my kids. And he's like, you're blowing my mind because dolphins don't eat sugar, they're not eating trans fats, it's not ultra processed foods.
- [46:32]
Dr. Nick Schork
That's what I'm wondering. Right.
- [46:33]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
And it's just like, what? And so, so that started our 10 year journey in which we have worked together, but independently, that Jeff then did a study in which he looked at 237 kids. And he did, at the time, they didn't have your wonderful test, which everybody should get, the test that Mark just mentioned to assess your liver, regardless of who you are and your age, everybody should get this test. So that Jeff did this study and he looked at these kids and he showed that the higher their C15 was correlated with lower liver fat. And this was a linear correlation. So the higher the C15, the lower the fat in the liver. So he's like, okay, well, that's interesting. So then that resulted in him doing a randomized placebo controlled clinical trial with fatty 15 with C15 supplementation among young adults who were graduates who had a history of fatty liver disease. And what he found, there were really key important things that happened that he found. The first is he found that two out of three of the people in his study had the definition of a C15 deficiency 2/3. So if you have fatty liver disease, yet you had an even higher risk of what we were saying, the general.
- [47:55]
Dr. Nick Schork
Population had 1 in 32 thirds.
- [47:57]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, exactly. And then for the people who took C15 supplementation and got their blood levels above that threshold of deficiency, they had lower liver enzymes, lower ALT, lower ASD, and improved red blood cell health within 12 weeks. So now the leading hypothesis and what we have found in the dolphins is that that nutritional C15 deficiencies may actually be the cause, or at least one cause of a substantial phenotype of fatty liver. Because why did it show up? Why, like why did this show up all of a sudden affect so many? So that is obviously raising, because sugar.
- [48:41]
Dr. Nick Schork
And starch is a massive part of our diet. And I think it probably might be a combination of the increase in sugar and starch plus the C15 deficiency. Right?
- [48:52]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. And, you know, for us, you know, we kept going back to the dolphins and for the dolphin, we call this the dolphin phenotype of fatty liver disease. The only change they had, they had moved to there was they were eating a high fish, high fat fish called yulican, which is called A candlefish, it has so much fat in it that you can stick a wick in it, you could dry it, stick a wick in it and be a candle. That fishery died out in the 1990s. And so that's when they moved to this lower fat capelin. And so at the same time that humans, we were moving away from whole fat dairy and our C15 sources, the dolphins were going on a low C15 diet and fatty liver disease popped up. Fascinating.
- [49:39]
Dr. Nick Schork
The Native Americans, you might not know this story, but the Native Americans used to trade in these really highly fatty, little tiny fish as part of their trade. So if you were, you know, Pacific Northwest Native American, and you would trade with inland tribes and use the fish as your currency. So instead of dollars, you'd send and give them fish and they'd give you beads or whatever else they wanted. So that's fascinating because it was such a valuable commodity back then.
- [50:05]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. And little now we understand even more so like how valuable that. So that kind of. As far as we also know that.
- [50:12]
Dr. Nick Schork
Cdc, that's a human trial. It seems to be.
- [50:15]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. Yeah.
- [50:15]
Dr. Nick Schork
And so that was published directionally showed what's possible. Like it didn't cure their fatty liver disease, but it seems to sort of create a downward trend in the effects. And you still have to cut out the sugar and starch.
- [50:25]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. We need to look at the whole picture of lifestyles and how we're changing things. What's interesting is it really goes against the whole, like, idea of all saturated fat fats are bad and that we have one that's essential. So it's like, how do we get it back into our diet? So there's a lot of. You could feel the urgency around this movement. The reason for the book is really to help increase education. And let's have the conversations around. See, we can't explain it away anymore.
- [50:57]
Dr. Nick Schork
So, you know, and what kind of studies have been in humans around diabetes, type 2 diabetes, diabetes and heart disease? Is there anything.
- [51:04]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So with regard to. There was a second study in Singapore and that's when I had mentioned that was also fatty liver disease, women with fatty liver disease. And it showed that it lowered LDL cholesterol and then increased the improved the gut microbiome. That was an interesting study because what they did for this clinical trial, and this was also a controlled clinical trial that they had, the control group was one that went on a hypocaloric diet. So they had between. They had an average. Yeah, exactly. Like 1,000 calories per day. That'd be tough to sustain. That was the first group. The second group was a low calorie plus Mediterranean guidelines, which both of those have been shown to help with fatty liver disease metabolism and very well.
- [51:51]
Dr. Nick Schork
Ketogenic diet works best.
- [51:53]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Even better. Even better. You're spot on. And then the third was low calorie Mediterranean plus plus C15 supplementation. So it was a big lift to ask of C15 in those groups. Not only did the third group, the C15 supplementation result lower LDL cholesterol and improved gut microbiome, but it also had the lowest. It had the greatest loss of liver fat, the greatest loss of body fat, the greatest glucose improvements, but it was trending. It was not statistically significant. You just kind of saw the step. But again, it was 12 weeks. And so the question is dosing, timing, things like that. In numerous studies of studies. So these meta analyses, right, Studies of studies that prospectively follow thousands of people over decades, numerous studies have consistently shown people with higher C15, just like we saw in the dolphins, lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, of heart disease, specifically coronary heart disease, of developing fatty liver disease and certain types of cancers, specifically, a lot of work on colorectal cancer. This is why with all these different aspects of the data from epidemiological data, clinical trials, mechanisms of action, in vivo efficacy studies. This is why Nick, Dr. Nick Schork, he was at ARD, which is one of the world's leading anti aging therapeutics meetings. He was in Copenhagen last year and he presented C15. He said, Listen, I've seen every longevity molecule under the sun and I've not seen a molecule that has more supportive data of being a longevity enhancing molecule than C15.
- [53:35]
Dr. Nick Schork
Most people I've never heard of it and don't know about it.
- [53:37]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right. And it's like, what? So then until now. Yeah, right.
- [53:40]
Dr. Nick Schork
Why you wrote the book and why we're having this podcast so people can understand this sort of emerging science around this. Which is kind of cool because it's not very often you come up with a new discovery like this. And there's a few questions I have around the foods to help people understand what foods they should be eating. We kind of touched on a little bit. But what are the foods that are highest in C15?
- [54:04]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So probably not the grapes that you're most excited about. Dairy fat by far is our primary source.
- [54:12]
Dr. Nick Schork
But depending on what the cows are eating.
- [54:14]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Depending upon what the cows are eating.
- [54:15]
Dr. Nick Schork
Or what the sheep or goat are eating.
- [54:17]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Exactly, Exactly. And so C15 for a long time has actually been used as a biological biomarker of how much dairy fat people ate. They didn't know that it had any meaning, so it was used as a reliable marker of how much. So that's how much dairy fat and again dependent upon what that animal is eating really drives our C15 levels. It's a big reason why the Navy funded again our development of the C15 supplement. Because it's a pure pre fatty acid supplement that's bioavailable. Just importantly, it's vegan and it is not having to compete with all of these pro inflammatory fatty acids.
- [55:01]
Dr. Nick Schork
So with the good comes a lot of the bad in dairy and that's what you want to avoid.
- [55:06]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah. Otherwise what's interesting, some of the studies.
- [55:09]
Dr. Nick Schork
You know, looking at, and these are epidemiological studies, we're looking at, you know, people who eat more dairy seem to have less diabetes. Right. So that's interesting. Is it the dairy fat? Is it something else? Is it saturated fats that protect them? I don't know, but it just sort of makes me wonder.
- [55:25]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, the dairy studies are super messy. And so there are absolutely studies showing this benefit. There was a recent study that looked at this to say, hey, why do some, some studies show that people who eat more dairy have a lower risk of a given disease and other dairy studies don't show it. And so what they were able to narrow down to and they concluded was that C15, higher levels of C15 were one of the main predictors of having a benefit. Higher levels of C18 was a predictor of having it being harmful. So again, it's not.
- [56:08]
Dr. Nick Schork
And that's another fatty acid that's saturated in dairy fat.
- [56:12]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's right. So it's, you know, and that's not going to be the simplistic answer, but I think it's the more we can understand how to maximize C15. You know, and maybe having a ratio like we have omega 6 to omega 3 ratios, maybe it's an even chain. Saturated fats which are these pro inflammatory fats to C50.
- [56:33]
Dr. Nick Schork
Yeah, I mean that's the thing people don't understand. People always say saturated fats bad. Is saturated fats good? I mean, there is no such thing as saturated fat. There are saturated fats.
- [56:40]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yes.
- [56:41]
Dr. Nick Schork
And each one has different properties and different benefits and different risks. And so uniformly they're not the same.
- [56:48]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Spot on.
- [56:48]
Dr. Nick Schork
And they don't affect your lipids the same way, your health the same way. I wrote a lot about this in my book Eat Fat get thin because people were super confused about it. I think that just kind of sort of sum up what I'm hearing is that this is a newly discovered molecule that is an essential nutrient that one in three of us are missing that has profound effects on many of the longevity pathways that have to do with aging. Mitochondrial health, blood sugar health, microbiome health, affect your liver health, you know, cholesterol, I mean it's quite, it's almost good. Too good to be true.
- [57:23]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right, yeah, we hear that, we hear that. That's, it's a, I think we get down to it's essential. It's just one of those rare molecules where we need it.
- [57:33]
Dr. Nick Schork
And what's beautiful about these molecules is they're not needed in huge amounts, right? So when you think about a vitamin like vitamin C and scurvy, it only takes like 60 milligrams of vitamin C to cure scurvy, which is a deadly disease if you don't have enough vitamin C. And by the way, 10% of Americans don't have enough vitamin C to.
- [57:50]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Prevent scurvy, which is mind blowing, right?
- [57:53]
Dr. Nick Schork
Which is because they're eating ultra processed food and they don't get any, any green vegetables and they don't get any fruit. And so, yeah, it's a big problem. But what I find interesting about vitamins is that they have very, very powerful effects or essential nutrients at very low levels. And without them, our whole metabolic and biochemical machinery doesn't work the way it was designed to work. And so things go wrong. And the things that go wrong are the things that we don't want to go wrong, like damaging our ability to keep healthy cells. The cell fragility syndrome, where your cells don't function properly and the membranes aren't right and fats make up your cell membranes, so they have to be healthy. And this is a key component of that. We have to regulate our mitochondria properly, our immune system properly, free radicals and oxidative stress properly our microbiome. So it's interesting that it sort of seems to work work in so many different ways. And I think there's a word that probably people have heard me talk about that is pleiotropic, meaning it has many different effects. So drugs usually have a single effect. They might have a few other side effects, but they're designed to be a single drug for a single biochemical targeted with a single receptor. The single outcome, working on a single pathway. And what, what nutrients do like for example, Magnesium activates over 300 different enzymes in the body. So does zinc, or maybe 200 different enzymes. So these are highly, I think vitamin D controls hundreds and hundreds of gene expressions throughout your genome. And these are multifunctional molecules that go beyond what we would normally think of as a pharmaceutical intervention. So these are the things that create health as opposed to simply treat disease. And I always say, when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. I love it. That's kind of what you're talking about here. This is a component of our biology that we've neglected, that we haven't known about, that has recently discovered thanks to the dolphins and you.
- [59:55]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
We'll thank the dolphins.
- [59:56]
Dr. Nick Schork
This was truly gift and just having an observation that, wow, geez, these dolphins aren't living very long. These are living longer. What's up with that? And just asking the right questions. You were able to come up with this discovery and I think it's really groundbreaking. I think people need to eat fatty fish. I think small fatty fish. If you're not gonna eat dairy, like herring, mackerel, sardines, anchovies, all this stuff that people don't like, you know?
- [60:22]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right. You gotta get it.
- [60:23]
Dr. Nick Schork
I'm Jewish, so I like all those things. Grew up on those things. I didn't know at the time.
- [60:29]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. You're already like, dosing yourself well with C15.
- [60:32]
Dr. Nick Schork
Yeah. Tons of cans of mackerel in my cupboard and cans of sardines. In terms of the dosing, like, what kind of doses do people need of this?
- [60:40]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
To your point? And that was a remarkable summary. The we need about 100 to 200 milligrams per day. So if you compare that to like omega 3s. Right. Then you're talking more about grams.
- [60:55]
Dr. Nick Schork
2,000 milligrams.
- [60:56]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, that's right. So this is to your point. It's very low dose of C15. It's 100% bioavailable in the free fatty acid form. So we only need a small amount. And again, in order to help fortify our cell membranes and keep them strong, we need greater than 0.2% of that cell membrane needs to be C15. So we don't need a lot.
- [61:23]
Dr. Nick Schork
Basically. A fifth of a percent.
- [61:25]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah.
- [61:27]
Dr. Nick Schork
Of the fats in your cells have to be this fat in order for it not to become fragile and break down.
- [61:32]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
You know, we only need these low amounts to achieve these levels in our cell membranes. We also know what's been remarkable studies about all these different mechanisms like activating ampk, inhibiting mtor. They're all showing the same concentrations. It's all the same amount that we need in our blood to have all of these many pleiotropic benefits. So it's very. The story just is so consistent on what we're intended to have to stay healthy. Now what we're saying is, hey, can we increase it and push it further so, like 0.4 to 0.6%. Can that help us be even healthier and live longer? And there's a big study that was done by a group at Harvard and a bunch of other teams, and they did a large study, and they showed that people who had these higher levels of. Instead of 0.2%, 0.4 to 0.55%, that they were less likely to develop heart disease over time. And then the longevity zone are going through an evolution. But in Sardinia, the people there who have. They live longer in part because they have a lower risk of developing heart disease. And specifically men live longer, longest in Sardinia than anywhere else in the world.
- [62:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I've been there.
- [62:53]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right? I'm jealous. Okay, so they have a mean C15 level of 0.6. And they have. They've replaced their.
- [63:03]
Dr. Nick Schork
That's fascinating.
- [63:04]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Right? And they've replaced their meat, for the most part, with cheese. They're using local cheese from local goats.
- [63:11]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, yeah.
- [63:12]
Dr. Nick Schork
No, this all makes sense.
- [63:13]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
High altitude.
- [63:14]
Dr. Nick Schork
What was really fascinating was when I spent quite a bit of time in Sardinia, I got to meet with a lot of these very old men and old women. And I mean, one couple, I think was 210 years old together.
- [63:27]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Oh, my goodness.
- [63:29]
Dr. Nick Schork
And they were fit and they were vibrant. This guy Pietro was like 95, was just kind of retired from herding his sheep five miles a day up the rocky terrain. And what was really fascinating was they understood that one of these guys, Olinto, said, we flavor our meat before we kill the animal. And I'm like, what do you mean? He says, well, whatever you feed, it determines the quality of the meat and the taste. So whether they feel carob or acorns or whatever, like the black footed pigs in. In Spain from the iberic and ham, very different fatty acid profile because all they do is live in oak forests and eat acorns. And in Sardinia, they know that if they take the sheep or the goat and they kind of graze them on different plants at different times of the year, it'll taste better. They're not doing it because it has high C15 levels, or they're looking for better phytochemicals or whatever. They just want to taste better. The reason, reason it Tastes better is that phytochemicals create the taste in food. So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness or density of the food. And, and they just kind of knew this intuitively by, by how they raise these animals. And so these animals are eating all these wild plants all the time. That's what they fed them. And so that, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense to me just given sort of being there and seeing what they were eating and what they were eating and what the cheese was made from and was really fascinating.
- [64:54]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, that is really cool. Yeah. One of their cheeses, Right. Which you might have seen there is pecorino. And Pecorino has higher C15 than most other cheeses. So yeah, it kind of feeds into this all kind of neat how this all comes together.
- [65:12]
Dr. Nick Schork
It's really fascinating. I mean, I think what I would love to sort of know from you is where is all this going? Like, what's next and what are we gonna see next in terms of the research that's underway, the things that are promising?
- [65:26]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah, well, this is the next step. So we spent 10 years on credibility that was really important before we even thought of bringing a supplement. And all the research out is really building the credibility. You could imagine a dolphin veterinarian saying, you need to take a saturated fat. You better be able to back that up with really good data. So we went above and beyond with regard to the science and then now the world has picked it up. So again, you can go to discoverc15.com and that's where all the peer reviewed papers, again, over 100 from people throughout the world. So that's a fun place to go.
- [66:04]
Dr. Nick Schork
And it's the letter C in the number 15.
- [66:06]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Thank you, thank you.
- [66:07]
Dr. Nick Schork
So discoverc15.com, we'll put in the show notes, but it's a treasure trove of the current and ongoing kind of research.
- [66:16]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yeah. And now probably once every two weeks there's a new paper coming out. So it's really exciting.
- [66:22]
Dr. Nick Schork
So it's not just you anymore. There's people all around the world who've taken up the research around this.
- [66:25]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That is right. That is right. Which is really exciting. Now the movement. Right.
- [66:29]
Dr. Nick Schork
Well, I mean, that's how science works, Right. Somebody discovers something and then other scientists just try to validate it or discredit it, Right?
- [66:36]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Yep, that's right. So that's been great to see. So then now we're moving toward exciting new avenues, obviously getting the conversations going. How can we Change nutritional guidelines. How can we get C15 for our kids into infants? With all the new studies that are coming out around the importance to infant health, as well as supporting our aging as we get older. And then we have some exciting new research coming out around brain health. So stay tuned for that.
- [67:05]
Dr. Nick Schork
Around cognitive development. Cognitive development from both spectrums. Right. From young cognitive development and also brain aging.
- [67:12]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
And also. Yeah, so a lot of exciting work coming out around that. And then, you know, for us, it's like we really have really taken a step back and said, why? Obviously there's urgency to fix, you know, global crisis that's happening. And if there is a chance that restoring C15 can help with that.
- [67:31]
Dr. Nick Schork
Global crisis of what?
- [67:32]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Of just metabolic diseases.
- [67:34]
Dr. Nick Schork
Metabolic disease.
- [67:34]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
The increase we're seeing. Yeah, the kids that were born into basically this height of the C15 deficiency world, which is the 1990s, they're now in their 30s. And so is this why people in their 30s are developing certain types of cancers? The rise in coronary heart disease, the rise in type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease showing up? And how much is the C15 deficiency part of that? So. So let's stop accelerated aging. There are kids that are developing diseases of their grandparents before their parents. So we've got to fix that. And then how to. Then again, leaning in, how do we optimize C15 through supplementation, through various practices to be able to extend our longevity? So that's exciting. And then what is it all for? I mean, longevity so we can live healthy for as long as possible and enjoy life. And. And I have a question for you, which is it's to give us more time. And so if you were given two extra hours of every day, and those two extra hours, whatever you did was guilt free. You didn't feel guilty about it because you weren't working on something else because you're so busy. What would you do with those two hours a day?
- [68:45]
Dr. Nick Schork
Two hours a day. That's a great question. I probably would exercise more.
- [68:50]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
That's great. It's more time to be able to do things because you have. Makes you feel good, right? And then it makes you healthier and it feeds all those things. And so for us, it's the ability to say, everybody has the right to longevity, to live a long life, to have a meaningful life. The book is about the purpose that fell in my lap through the dolphins. And let's give us all more time to be able to fulfill our purpose.
- [69:15]
Dr. Nick Schork
I'm excited to see what's next. This is very exciting. You can read about this in great detail. Stephanie's new book, the Longevity the Unexpected Fat that Holds the Key to Healthy Aging. It's out now, so you definitely should check it out. Also, if you're interested to learn more, go to discoverc15.com and you can actually buy C15 as a supplement and it's called Fatty 15, which I love and I take. I just take two capsules a day and that's it. And it's pretty straightforward. It's a low friction way to get it. You don't like sardines and herring and mackerel? Hopefully I'm not overdosing because I do eat those, but no overdosing over. I think we're kind of in this moment where we are discovering a lot about aging and longevity, but we can't miss the forest for the trees, which is the fact that we're eating a diet that's killing us and the amount of sugar and starch is driving our metabolic crisis is causing a lot of the things that are going on. I think C15 can be helpful in mitigating that, but without actually also changing your diet. Exercising, getting up sleep, managing stress, having connections and relationships, chips. It's not enough. Right?
- [70:21]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
So that's right. It's part of the solution. But boy, all those things are so, so important.
- [70:27]
Dr. Nick Schork
Yeah, exactly. So don't. You don't want to eat your C15.
- [70:30]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Supplement and not exercise and so three.
- [70:33]
Dr. Nick Schork
Cans of soda a day, please don't do that. So thanks for coming on the podcast again. This is really great. Everybody can find out more and we'll put it on the show. Notes for the links that we talked about and and keep up the good work and we'll stay tuned for what's next on the horizon.
- [70:49]
Dr. Stephanie Seneff
Great. It's great to be here, Dr. Hyman. Thank you.
- [70:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more.
- [71:11]
Dr. Nick Schork
More.
- [71:11]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or.
- [71:41]
Dr. Nick Schork
Other professional advice or services.
- [71:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
- [72:14]
Dr. Nick Schork
Hey Dr. Hyman here. I'm the author of 15 New York Times bestselling books, I'm the host of the top rated Dr. Hyman show podcast and have over 7 million social media followers. And today I'm excited to announce something special. A place where we can go even deeper together. It's called the Hyman Hybrid Hive, a space where you can learn directly from me and my team and thousands of others who are serious about their health. Inside the hive, you'll get access to monthly live events with me, expert coaching, behind the scenes content, science backed protocols and challenges to keep you motivated, and lots more. If you're ready to take control of your health, I'd love to have you join us Right now. You can join the wait list and lock in founding member pricing. Just $27 a month, the lowest it'll ever be. But this offer won't last, so just go over to Dr.hyman.com hive h I v E and join the waitlist. Now that's Dr.hyman.com hive and I can't wait to see you inside.