← The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
121. Dr. Matt Cook: Reversing Age with Peptides, Stem Cells & Gene Therapy
00:46:47
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- [00:00]
Dr. Matt Cook
Who's the queen of healing in the body is the stem cell. The immune system is the system that heals musculoskeletal problems. It turns out that there's a peptide that is an immune peptide that tends to be very helpful.
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Gary Brecka
I'm such a huge fan of the peptides and their use. Because of the limited risk profile, some of these other really advanced, scientifically valid evidence based have a real propensity to truly extend life.
- [00:28]
Dr. Matt Cook
The most impactful peptides are this category of peptides that are immune peptides that tend to stimulate or regulate the immune system.
- [00:37]
Gary Brecka
Wow, you think? Even more so than growth hormone peptides and healing peptides, these are the most impactful.
- [00:43]
Dr. Matt Cook
We're designing peptides as a strategy that will address every organ system.
- [00:49]
Gary Brecka
What does a journey like that look like from whatever state that I'm in now to where I'm really optimized and setting myself up to live a life of longevity anti aging.
- [01:00]
Dr. Matt Cook
You've got to pick the low hanging fruit and you got to start with.
- [01:11]
Gary Brecka
Ultimate human. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, Gary Brecka, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything anti aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. And we are very, very blessed to have a good friend of mine. He's somewhat of a mentor to me, probably a mentor to a lot of physicians in the functional medicine space. An anesthesiologist that became a functional medicine icon. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Cook.
- [01:43]
Dr. Matt Cook
Thank you so much, Cook. I'm delighted to be here and even more delighted to hang out with you.
- [01:49]
Gary Brecka
Yeah, yeah, no, we had a great morning. We like did our, we did our functional medicine morning. You know, we, we did the, the biohacking more. We did breath work this morning. You showed me some really cool new techniques too.
- [02:01]
Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah.
- [02:02]
Gary Brecka
For actually creating. Before we did red light, we did red light steam and sauna, cold plunge, breath work. And, and after the breath work, you showed me a really cool technique for creating a vacuum in your thoracic and abdominal cavities to actually help drain the lymph, which I want to talk about at some point during the podcast because I love to give, you know, people these tips that they can use that cost absolutely nothing but could have a profound, you know, impact on the trajectory of their life. But for my guests that don't know you, I mean, you're a medical doctor, but you, you started your career as an anesthesiologist. Can you talk a little bit about your journey from anesthesiologist to functional medicine practitioner. Because I don't think anybody ever starts out in functional medicine.
- [02:53]
Dr. Matt Cook
Right? Yeah. So true. That's so true. Yeah.
- [02:56]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
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Dr. Matt Cook
So I, I thought I was going to be an expedition doctor and go on big journeys and I needed to be in a field where I could take six months off and go to Everest.
- [03:06]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [03:07]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so we, I went into anesthesia and started doing that with the idea that I, I could be in a real technical with a lot of physiology. So I was really interested in physiology in medical school and so was doing that. And I got really lucky that the year that I got out of my residency was the year that ultrasound basically came onto the market where we had portable ultrasounds that we could use.
- [03:37]
Gary Brecka
You're really yourself with that. You're around the invention 1842.
- [03:42]
Dr. Matt Cook
But that's why I'm an anti Asian.
- [03:43]
Gary Brecka
They didn't even have television back there. It was like horse and bugg. But.
- [03:47]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then when I had, when I was in my residency, we basically would use a nerve stimulator and we would use landmarks to know where a nerve was. And then we would go, and then we would touch the nerve, which would sometimes hurt a little bit, but then the, the person would be twitching and we would turn the stimulator down to know that we weren't in the middle of the nerve and then put numbing medicine around those nerves. And so basically I was doing nerve blocks, running surgery centers and doing basically surgery for sports medicine.
- [04:18]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [04:19]
Dr. Matt Cook
And, but, you know, I started to realize surgery was not the panacea for healing athletes that we thought it was. And so then I began to get skeptical. And so almost right away I started becoming a functional medicine doctor.
- [04:33]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [04:34]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so I studied qigong and Chinese medicine and Ayurveda and got board certified in functional and integrative medicine. And so I was on this kind of 12 year journey of a little bit of a schizophrenic life of living like this super straight western medicine injection job and then kind of an alternative. And so I would work in the mornings in the surgery center in the afternoons, and then in the afternoons you.
- [05:02]
Gary Brecka
Were more western medicine. Qigong, Ayurveda.
- [05:05]
Dr. Matt Cook
Exactly.
- [05:06]
Gary Brecka
These are some of the oldest medicines in the world. I think Ayurvedic medicine is the oldest.
- [05:10]
Dr. Matt Cook
Form of medicine in the world and super, super advanced, super advanced stuff. And so then, and then what happened? About halfway through I came home and one day Barb goes, oh, guess what? I found out what you're going to do for the rest of your Life. And then I go, what's that? She goes, oh, the, they're doing injections with ultrasound and putting something around nerves that's not local anesthetic. I go, really? And I go, where is it? She goes, oh, it's, it's happening tomorrow. I bought you a plane ticket, I got you a hotel, and I signed you up for the course.
- [05:45]
Gary Brecka
Sounds to me like somebody needed some downtime.
- [05:48]
Dr. Matt Cook
Exactly.
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Gary Brecka
That sounds like something my wife would do to me.
- [05:51]
Dr. Matt Cook
Guess what?
- [05:52]
Gary Brecka
And like try to sell it as like a POS. I bought you a 3 day vacation by yourself, like so.
- [06:01]
Dr. Matt Cook
And when I got, I showed up, I had already been doing ultrasound guided injection basically all day for the lot. Because what my, my old job was, I would put the brachial plexus, which is all the nerves that go to your arm asleep. And then we would do shoulder arthroscopy, but we wouldn't have to put the person to sleep.
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Gary Brecka
Ah.
- [06:18]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then, you know, then when we found out that there were other things, next thing you know, we're putting dextrose followed by prp, followed by peptides, stem cells, exosomes, and all of the regenerative things that we now inject around nerves.
- [06:36]
Gary Brecka
Right.
- [06:37]
Dr. Matt Cook
And then as soon as we started doing that, then all of a sudden the awareness sort of came out of regenerative medicine. So we started injecting ligaments, tendons, fascia, nerves and joints.
- [06:48]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [06:49]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so what were you injecting with at that time? So at the very beginning, we were doing the injections with prp. And what PRP is, is if you do a blood draw and you take and you isolate platelets in the blood, and then those platelets, you can concentrate them and inject, and they've got a lot of growth factors.
- [07:08]
Gary Brecka
Right.
- [07:09]
Dr. Matt Cook
Eventually then we started to move up the ladder of regenerative medicine to better and better products. And so now we have a wide variety of different products that we inject with. And we can inject those not just into joints and nerves, but also we can put them iv. And so we combine that with glutathione and vitamin C and all of that stuff. So there's a systemic approach and then a local approach.
- [07:37]
Gary Brecka
Hey guys, I'm really excited to announce this. Perfect aminos has gotten a serious upgrade. They've added nucleotides, the building blocks of our nucleic acids, DNA and rna. And this is important. We know essential amino acids are the building blocks of protein and collagen. Having all the essential amino acids in the correct ratio is is necessary for complete protein synthesis without the caloric impact. But if we want perfect protein synthesis, we need to look at the process of protein synthesis itself. Because if the process is faulty, we won't get the correctly made protein, collagen, fibrin, or the red blood cells in our bloodstream or our muscles. We can even stop creation of specific proteins which can affect us in so many different ways. Our DNA and our RNA are what direct protein synthesis, building new proteins. If our DNA or RNA get damaged from toxins, harmful bacteria, or just plain aging, we get faulty protein synthesis. So cells, enzymes and hormones are less functional. And we get premature aging by adding nucleosides and nucleotides. The building blocks of the nucleic acid's DNA and RNA are our cells get exactly what they need to help repair faulty DNA and RNA and improve the process of protein synthesis itself. This is next level science and you need to try these. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. You know, we've had some really fascinating conversations over the last few days and I appreciate you being willing to come and actually stay and stay in the unit with me and spend so much time. We're off to Honduras here soon for, for some really interesting gene therapy injections. But you know, one of the things that I really found fascinating about our discussion is that, you know, I, I was talking to you about how do you walk a patient through from where they are to being good, to being better, to being their absolute best? Because I think that a lot of people think the presence of health is just the simple absence of disease. And I think the functional medicine doctor would take issue with that and say it's not just that you're not in a disease state, you know, it's that you're in your most optimal state. So for someone listening to this podcast that is really interested on, in going as far as they can possibly go within the limits of evidence based medicine, what would a journey like that look like? What would, you know, would there be testing in the beginning? And then would you progress to some of the biologics, peptides? What does a journey like that look like from whatever state that I'm in now to where I'm really optimized and, and setting myself up to live a life of, let's call it longevity aging?
- [10:32]
Dr. Matt Cook
Okay, that's a great question. And I feel like I'm doing that here because we're doing all of these fundamental things. And so, you know, you've got to pick the low hanging fruit and you got to start with the easy, low cost things to do, which is super healthy lifestyle, perfect diet, and then all of the lifestyle biohacking things that we do today. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's the foundation and I think that it's probably a year curriculum to learn how to design your life. So you create the space for all of that stuff. And as I was, I was saying to Barb, we basically feel like we got, we, we live the perfect lifestyle. And then I go, carrie's better at biohacking and lifestyle than we are.
- [11:21]
Gary Brecka
Yay.
- [11:25]
Dr. Matt Cook
But you actually said that to me.
- [11:26]
Gary Brecka
At the coffee maker this morning. I was, I was like, I'm feeling pretty good. When the top functional medicine experts like, I like your biohacking, Pat. I think you got me.
- [11:35]
Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah, you beat me. And it's amazing here. But so then the next thing is, where are we starting? What's our baseline? You need a before and after. If you're going to say, what's the best place we can go? You got to have data. And so then I'm part of a team that we're developing an AI platform and then we're going to do all labs, wearables, and then track all modalities that are done. So we're tracking peptides, stem cells, exosomes, and then every other intervention, gene therapy that people are doing. To really know how people are doing, we need to have heart rate variability. And you know, my issue is I basically started to have the amount of data that I used to get. I could kind of, I had it all in my head and then now basically I get a pile this big. It's from five or six different countries. And I don't have access to your wearables, I don't have access to all this data. And so nobody's able to pull this into one central place.
- [12:37]
Gary Brecka
Right.
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Dr. Matt Cook
So one, we've got to organize that and then track that longitudinally over time. And then basically you use basically language modeling to understand labs and data and conversation. And ultimately that's going to be an assist to a consultation. And then ultimately that's just going to be sitting here doing a consult better than I can than a physician.
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Gary Brecka
Because they get, they can, they can weigh so many different independent variables.
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Dr. Matt Cook
Exactly. And so then the other part of it is if you look at the big pharma companies, when they're trying to determine effectiveness of their drugs, they use a quantitative model. And so we're using a large quantitative model to turn that lens of looking at all of this data in terms of effectiveness of stem Cells, exosomes, peptides, regenerative medicine, gene therapy.
- [13:28]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
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Dr. Matt Cook
And so then now you're tracking all of that, and then what? Then we're going to learn a lot. We're going to learn exponentially more than we've ever known in the next five to 10 years.
- [13:39]
Gary Brecka
I would agree with that. And what's exciting is as all of this data comes in because of artificial intelligence and the capacity to take large pools of data and create an actionable result, you can for the first time sieve through it and really create something that's actually actionable. You know, one of the genetics laboratories that, that we work with takes 700 trillion independent variables and creates an actionable result. When people go, how do you take 700 trillion independent variables? Well, I mean, if you look at your genome and you look at the possible variants in all of those sequences and the sub alleles and, and, and the, and the gene snips, these single nucleotide polymorphs and you, and you tried to make sense of it on a spreadsheet or in an Excel model, it just, you just couldn't, couldn't do it. But AI can take all of that information and create these actionable results. And I like how, you know, you described to me this morning, you know, it has to start with the diet and the lifestyle changes. You don't fix the lifestyle, then you're just pushing down from the top, right? I mean, you're, you're just, you're just fixing the consequences of the lifestyle. But once you fix those, and you've got, let's say somebody's blood work in good condition, you know, their triglycerides are where they need to be, cholesterol as well. Their hormones seem to be balanced, they're not nutrient deficient any longer. The big cardiac, you know, risk markers, homocysteine, C reactive protein are all kind of normalized. But now the exciting thing is you don't have to stop there.
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Dr. Matt Cook
100.
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Gary Brecka
So I wonder if we, we might just start with peptides as a treatment, you know, option and what they are, what they do and, and why we should be using them and, and where you see it going.
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Dr. Matt Cook
Okay, amazing. So our, I was saying our body has about five different ways that it communicates with itself. And so hormones, cytokines, vitamins and minerals and, and then, and proteins. And these are, proteins are made up of amino acids. And so then if you have an amino acid that's more than a protein, that's more than 50amino acids long, that's called a Protein, if it's less than 50amino acids, is called a peptide.
- [15:54]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
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Dr. Matt Cook
So peptide is a baby protein. And so then an example of a protein would be like, insulin. It binds onto an insulin receptor, opens a channel, and so then that causes sugar to go inside of a cell.
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Gary Brecka
Okay.
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Dr. Matt Cook
So proteins or peptides basically bind onto receptors and then cause something to happen.
- [16:13]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [16:14]
Dr. Matt Cook
Now if we take a drug, a drug is usually trying to hack biology, but biology typically tries to overcome that hack. So a lot of times then as a result, over time, you end up having to take more of that drug, and there's a lot of side effects. In the case of a peptide or a protein, we're just giving the actual thing that's working in the body kind of like when you take a hormone.
- [16:40]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
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Dr. Matt Cook
And so there's. There seems to be about an order of magnitude less side effects and complications. And then we. I was. For. For us, our pillars, which are, I think, are probably fairly similar to yours. We have 12 pillars, cell biology, musculoskeletal system, and genetics, and then nine pillars that are organ systems.
- [17:02]
Gary Brecka
All the nine major organ systems. I would agree with that.
- [17:05]
Dr. Matt Cook
So then basically, there's a pep. There's multiple peptides for each of those organ systems and for each asp of each of the pillars.
- [17:13]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [17:14]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then when. When we're working with people and then we're working on optimizing their life, and then I would say there's two things. One is, if there's a problem, then you might be working on the gastrointestinal system, and you might be giving supplements. You could also give a peptide that would help the gastrointestinal system. You might have a neurological problem. And so there are supplements that'll help with the central nervous system, but there's also peptides.
- [17:42]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [17:43]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then, now we're designing the peptides as a strategy that will address every organ system.
- [17:51]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [17:51]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then to. To answer your question, I got. I got somebody. We. We spent a year, and all of a sudden their lifestyle is perfect.
- [18:01]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [18:02]
Dr. Matt Cook
Then we spent another year, and they solved basically their brain fog and all of their kind of main problems. And so here they are. We've got all of their data. They've got wearables, and they're getting their labs and they're in a good place. Where are we going to go from here?
- [18:18]
Gary Brecka
Right.
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Dr. Matt Cook
So then the. The. The most impactful peptides are this category of peptides that are immune peptides that tend to stimulate or regulate the immune system.
- [18:31]
Gary Brecka
Wow. You think even more so than growth hormone peptides and healing peptides. These are the most impactful in terms.
- [18:38]
Dr. Matt Cook
Of their system wide, in terms of a system wide. And I'm going to say that in, at the end of 2024, coming out of COVID And so then what happens is, is the immune peptides, when we travel and we're on planes overnight and, and our immune system is a little down, then we take immune peptides and they stimulate the immune system. If we get cold, we start taking immune peptides right away.
- [19:04]
Gary Brecka
Right.
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Dr. Matt Cook
And so then that cold lasts for a day and a half instead of 10 days. And so then what? You have an ability to be basically released into the wild and running around and exposed to risk. And so then we've got peptides basically for everything. So, and so then you can regulate and, and peptides for the most part last about a day. So they're a short term thing. And so I don't necessarily do peptides every day. I feel like the Dos Equis commercial.
- [19:38]
Gary Brecka
Yeah, yeah, I don't take peptides every day, but when I do it's BBC 157.
- [19:44]
Dr. Matt Cook
Exactly. And so then, and so then that's a, it's a real nice regulatory tool that you can use. And we travel with them and then, and then interestingly, they're very helpful tools as part of a functional regenerative medicine strategy towards, towards optimizing the body. So we even do injections with them.
- [20:05]
Gary Brecka
That's great. So, so let's climb the ladder of peptides. So the peptides are amino acid sequences which, which means that the body recognizes them, which I, I, I am, by the way, for the record, a huge fan of peptides. We've used them in our clinic system on well over a hundred thousand patients and virtually no side effects. The downside is occasionally they don't work, not that they create harm. And I think that risk profile is excellent because a lot of times when we use chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals, the downside is that you do permanent irrevocable damage.
- [20:39]
Dr. Matt Cook
Right.
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Gary Brecka
And, and then you can't just say, hey, my bad, I, I altered the neuroplasticity of your brain. And what we decided, you know, to take this for didn't work. But now you have permanent alteration in physiologic function. I've seen that quite a number of times, you know, with, you know, amphetamines and things like that that we're using to try to get people around conditions like ADD or adhd. And now somebody's been on a long Prolonged dose of Adderall. That's that where it' aggressively gotten, you know, more and more and more. And now you've, you know, you went in to fix a condition of attention deficit disorder, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And now you created a central nervous system dependency on an, on a stimulant. Okay, so I'll take that sometimes works, right?
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Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah, 100%. So I'll take that one.
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Gary Brecka
Yeah.
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Dr. Matt Cook
So then in, in a situation like that, then what for, for the ADD people then? And the, there's an idea. One of my lines is a rising tide lifts all boats. And so I say the same thing.
- [21:42]
Gary Brecka
Tide raises all the boats. I, I, I say it almost every day, don't I guys?
- [21:46]
Dr. Matt Cook
Okay, amazing. And so then the one functional medicine idea is if you could just improve mitochondrial function.
- [21:54]
Gary Brecka
Oh my gosh.
- [21:54]
Dr. Matt Cook
Then everything then, then you're going to improve cognitive function. And so then we like to use SS31, stabilizes mitochondrial membranes. SS31 like to take NAD, which, which will also donate electrons in the mitochondrial chain so it helps give you energy. And so then just that combo. And then we'll take C, C Max, which increases bdnf, which is brain derived neurotropic factor. And cognition will help for cognition. And then a lot of people with ADD actually have a little bit of immune over activation which basically leads to blood flowing with more viscosity. And, and I think that's one of the reasons for brain fog. And so we'll give often a little bit of TA1 or BPC157. That as a stack is way better for mental clarity than a stimulant.
- [22:51]
Gary Brecka
Ah, right.
- [22:52]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then the, the ADD conversation is a, is a conversation that would be like I could probably just quit everything else and just have a scaled approach to add and we beat stimulants every day.
- [23:05]
Gary Brecka
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- [24:54]
Dr. Matt Cook
That's right. So that's, that's been this tag team combo that people have used for both for pain and for inflammation and that remember I said there's something for every organ. Basically BPC is actually a gastrointestinal peptide, but when we eat, it's secreted. And so the idea is we're mostly hooligans and we're gonna do whatever we're gonna do. So our body makes some anti inflammatory things to protect us from ourselves.
- [25:29]
Gary Brecka
Right. Okay.
- [25:30]
Dr. Matt Cook
Now then, the other thing to remember is what all of the who's the queen of healing in the body is the stem cell. So the immune system is the system that heals musculoskeletal problems. And so then it turns out that there's a peptide that is an immune peptide which is called TB500, which is a fragment of the thymus and beta 4 peptide. But that immune peptide tends to be very helpful for connective tissue healing.
- [26:03]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [26:04]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so we'll combine BPC and TB 500 and together that, that, that combo is, is very helpful. And you can do it in your belly or your hip for a systemic effect, but you can also, if you have pain somewhere, do a site Injection. Exactly.
- [26:22]
Gary Brecka
Yeah. That's amazing. And, and you know, again, I'm a big fan because the risk profile is really very attractive. And then if we move up the ladder on peptides and we start talking about things like cognition, you know, we're talking about tissue repair, but if we talk about cognition, meaning improving our cognitive function or short term recall, or focus or waking energy, our concentration, things like that, that are a little more difficult to measure, but people notice and the people around them notice that, you know, they're not as sharp or they're just not as attentive or they're not able to focus as much, they're not able to recall things as accurately as they used to. And what, what do we have in the category of cognitive peptides?
- [27:09]
Dr. Matt Cook
Okay. So then the probably C max, which I mentioned, is going to be your best cognitive peptide that's commercially available. And so then that one increases bdnf.
- [27:20]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [27:20]
Dr. Matt Cook
And which is the brain derived neurotropic factor. And which is that?
- [27:25]
Gary Brecka
Why is it important?
- [27:26]
Dr. Matt Cook
It's like an antioxidant to the brain.
- [27:28]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [27:29]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then we, we have ner. We have probably on average more neurological inflammation than we can handle. And that as we get older, our ability to handle neurological inflammation goes down and then we tend and inflammation tends to go up. And a lot of times that comes from gastrointestinal information inflammation. That's why they call it the gut brain axis. So then one thing is going to be to do something for the brain. The other thing is going to be to do something for the gut to heal that. So we don't have inflammation that's getting causing leaky gut, that's going to leaky brain.
- [28:06]
Gary Brecka
Right.
- [28:06]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then you could go make it easy, since you already talked about it. BPC157, which is the gastrointestinal peptide, also promotes something called angiogenesis, which is blood vessel growth.
- [28:18]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [28:19]
Dr. Matt Cook
And it also improves the flow of blood. So like if I do an IV and then I do BPC 157 IV.
- [28:28]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
- [28:28]
Dr. Matt Cook
What happens is, is you can see that the blood becomes a little bit thinner.
- [28:32]
Gary Brecka
Wow. And it'll leave the viscosity change.
- [28:34]
Dr. Matt Cook
You can. The viscosity changes for sure.
- [28:36]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [28:36]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so a lot of times people will just do BPC plus cmax, which, which is a great cognition enhancer. Adding nad, like we were talking about in the setting of somebody with ADD can be helpful. The. I would say that there's an idea that immune stress and immune activation leads us to have basically more antibodies floating around in our blood that could be binding onto things which is decreasing viscosity and decreasing blood flow.
- [29:09]
Gary Brecka
Right.
- [29:09]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then things that can regulate the immune response. And so one of those at a peptide level would be something like Thymus and Alpha 1. Another thing that it to, to go up the ladder, another thing that regulates immune function is exosomes. And so then wow. You could, you could potentially take exosomes with any of those other products and you could do them either subcutaneously or iv.
- [29:39]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [29:40]
Dr. Matt Cook
You could even inject it into your joint and then some of that's going to be absorbed and will have a systemic effect.
- [29:45]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
- [29:46]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so you'll, a lot of times we'll do an injection for somebody and all we'll do is do a shoulder joint injection and they'll go oh, how come my brain fog just totally went away?
- [29:58]
Gary Brecka
Wow. When you get inject them with exosomes.
- [30:00]
Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah.
- [30:01]
Gary Brecka
Which I want to get to next. You know, I, I, my mother had some struggles for a while because she was bedridden from a bilateral knee surgery that she had and I put her on cerebral license. And I'm telling you in just a few weeks it was night and day. My father actually called and like can you tone her down a little bit? Like he's like redecorate the whole house. She's got all new artwork coming in like she is on fire. I mean she went from being mid-70s year old woman cognitively to like an early-40s. It was night and day the difference. And that was the cerebralysin peptide and I got it originally injectable. Now she takes an oral version of it. But I'm, I'm again I'm such a huge fan of the, of the peptides and their use because of the limited risk profile. And now we get into the like the really exciting things, you know, stem cells, exosomes and some of these other really advanced, cutting edge but scientifically valid evidence based therapies that are going on in, in mass outside of the United States and in some cases are allowed here, some cases are not allowed here, but have a real propensity to truly extend life and maybe even reverse the cause or reverse the pathology and diseases that we at one time thought were not reversible. Maybe we thought we could halt them but not actually reverse them. And I'd love first to talk about stem cells and then how a stem cell secretes an exosome, the difference between the two and for therapeutic reasons. What are some of your recommendations? Let's just assume for the sake of argument, and I. I don't mean to off put my audience, that somebody has an unlimited budget just for the sake of this part of the discussion. And what. What are some of the things that they could do and expect from some of these biologics? Like stem cells?
- [32:05]
Dr. Matt Cook
Okay, great. So there was this great idea that they figured out that a. A stem cell actually has the potential to turn into any other type of cell.
- [32:21]
Gary Brecka
Pluripotent.
- [32:22]
Dr. Matt Cook
So it's kind of pluripotent. And so then this was this idea. And so then for the first half of my experience in regenerative medicine, which was sort of like right at the beginning, this was this idea. And so we were focused on that. And. And I was and still am fairly involved in adipose stem cells. And so then we were having this idea that that could go turn into a cartilage cell or it could go turn into a tendon cell. So then it's a. It's a total solution. And it's. The name was mesenchymal stem cell. Basically what happened is, is the person, Arnold Kaplan, who passed away, but it's like one of the godfathers of regenerative medicine figured out that these stem cells don't really turn into another cell, but what they do is they basically secrete little liposomal balls of. That have signaling molecules inside that tell other cells what to do. It's kind of like currency. And so then they change the name to medicinal signaling cells. And so stem cells are essentially a little mobile pharmacy.
- [33:29]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [33:29]
Dr. Matt Cook
And then they show up, and then they secrete exosomes. And the exosomes is kind of like currency that goes around currency and information that is just goes to the other cells in the area.
- [33:41]
Gary Brecka
Mm.
- [33:42]
Dr. Matt Cook
And then it initiates healing. And basically it tells them how to behave. It tells them. And basically what happens is, is if we have inflammation, let's say you get a trauma. We were talking about this today. It causes inflammation, which causes increased blood flow and pain. That's just a signal for a stem cell that may be there or that migrates from the bloodstream. And then the stem cell turns the inflammation off as the first step in healing. There's a whole bunch of steps that happen after that.
- [34:12]
Gary Brecka
Right.
- [34:12]
Dr. Matt Cook
That are coordinated by the stem cell. And so the stem cell secretes exosomes that. And I basically, I always tell people economic indicators are good. Kind of like right now you can get a loan, the economy is going to be getting better, and we can do a remodeling project and fix this muscle that was torn.
- [34:29]
Gary Brecka
Wow. And, and so the stem cell arrives on the scene because it's called the site of inflammation. And when it arrives, it begins to deploy these little soldiers called exosomes, which are about 1, 800 the size of a stem cell. They're nano vesicles, nanoparticles, we've talked about these before on the show. You know, they cross the phospholipid bilayer of the cell without permission, which is a good thing because very often when you have damage to a cell, you know, things are not allowed through the membrane wall. And you know, imagine having a heart attack on your floor, but the paramedics being locked outside the cell door. You know, their proximity doesn't matter. So very often the proximity for a cell to get help doesn't matter because the help is locked outside the door. It's outside of their, that cell wall. And I agree with you. I think, you know, the really promising thing about exosomes is their molecular size and the fact that they don't have DNA. Right. So they can't actually transmit a signal from somebody else's body. Right. And they carry something called high molecular weight, hyaluronic acid and growth factors. So what are the benefits of using these kinds of biologics like exosomes systemically, intravenously?
- [35:43]
Dr. Matt Cook
So then I would say the most important thing is, is they tend to regulate immune function. And so we live in, in a sea of inflammation and, and we had that one bruise, but then that turned into 10 and that turned into inflammation in our liver and fatty liver and inflammation in our brain and our gut. And so we have more inflammation than we can handle. And then the cells are just waiting for a signal that everything is okay, that they can start to heal.
- [36:12]
Gary Brecka
Right.
- [36:12]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then exosomes are very anti inflammatory. And so like if you take, when I take a big trip and I'm, I got back from Dubai and you get, you take exosomes, it's almost like you feeling like you just took a shower.
- [36:26]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
- [36:26]
Dr. Matt Cook
And all the stress on the inside of your body.
- [36:29]
Gary Brecka
I couldn't agree with you more. I love taking the exosomes. I, I, I feel like I'm looking through a 4K screen, you know, like the, it's hard to describe. Like your vision is brighter, it's clearer and you have that just very clear, cognizant, awake, focused feeling of, and it's not being stimulated. You don't feel like you did two shots of espresso. You feel just clear and awake and alert and cognizant. And I notice how energetic I am after doing exosomes. And then my sleep just is incredible. So. And then above the exosome, which, you know, also really, really exciting. And I think this is a frontier where we're safely learning to go so that we can actually manage, begin to manage longevity. And that's the gene therapies. And one in particular I, I want to talk about. Cause I, I have some biohacking buddies that did some of these gene therapies, specifically the follistatin myostatin inhibiting gene therapy. And one of them put on 14 pounds of muscle in 45 days. And I remember seeing him at a, I saw him at the conference in, in Europe and I ran into him, I go, all right, brother, what are you doing? I mean, did you get on growth hormone? Because I know he's sort of, you know, not for that. And he said, no, I, you know, went to Honduras. I did this f. Statin gene therapy and, and then I just went deep down the road of this genetic therapy and I wonder if now, you know, I would consider these to be sort of top of the food chain, longevity, anti aging treatments. Could you talk a little bit about those?
- [38:15]
Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah, a hundred percent that we. Can we. Can I say that person's name?
- [38:19]
Gary Brecka
Yeah, it's Ben Greenfield. Yeah, I think Ben's talked about it.
- [38:22]
Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah, I think he talked about it.
- [38:23]
Gary Brecka
Before we hear the podcast. I'll make sure he's said it in the pod we talked about on my podcast. Yeah, yeah.
- [38:27]
Dr. Matt Cook
Okay.
- [38:28]
Gary Brecka
So, so, yeah, shout out, buddy. You're the.
- [38:30]
Dr. Matt Cook
I love you, Ben. We love you, Ben. So then I, I was in London at that health summit.
- [38:37]
Gary Brecka
Yeah. And I saw you there.
- [38:38]
Dr. Matt Cook
I was, I was literally standing and like on my phone. And then I, I hung up. And then I was looking at him just like he was at the camera. And I just was like, that guy's jacked.
- [38:51]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
- [38:51]
Dr. Matt Cook
And then I was like, and then I'm looking.
- [38:54]
Gary Brecka
And that was doing good before that.
- [38:56]
Dr. Matt Cook
But yeah, and then he's, he's looking at me and we're both looking at each other. And then I, and then I didn't, I didn't even recognize him. He was so big. I did it also and I, I've put on about eight pounds. And, and, and so then let me, let me tell you about the, the science of this one. And remember, we were. The body has a number of different ways it's communicating with itself. One is hormones, one is protein based things. If it's a baby protein, it's a Peptide. If it's a long protein, as a protein, one thing you could do is inject it. If you inject it today, it's going to have a nice effect today, but it's going to be gone tomorrow. Right. Peptide. And, and it's easy to inject peptides. It's a lot harder to inject a protein. Follistatin is 344amino acids long. So then what happened is, is there's two ways to do this, but there's a company called Mini Circle and what they did is they, they took the gene for Follistatin. So it's, it's a gene that codes for 344amino acids and they put it in a circular plasmid and then you can inject that into your shoulder. It gets absorbed by the cells and then it pulls that plasmid into the nucleus. It doesn't actually get incorporated into your chromosomes.
- [40:17]
Gary Brecka
Okay.
- [40:17]
Dr. Matt Cook
But while it's in there for about a year and a half, your, your body prints that plasmid. And so then when it prints that plasmid, it actually makes follistatin. So instead of doing an injection every day, then for a year, year and a half, you have this, this protein at a higher concentration in your body and, and it's floating around and then.
- [40:44]
Gary Brecka
That protein is actually, is inhibiting the protein that inhibits muscle growth. Right, the myostatin protein. And there's a second one.
- [40:56]
Dr. Matt Cook
Active, inactive.
- [40:58]
Gary Brecka
Yeah. That's actually inhibiting muscle growth because obviously when we damage muscle and it, and it grows back larger, that muscle hypertrophy, it's a well known concept, but at some point the hypertrophy is limited by this myostatin. And what the follistatin does is it, it blocks that from working. So your hypertrophy is not as, as, as limited. And what do you feel about the safety of some of these therapies? Because when we say gene therapies, I mean, just like you said, it migrates into the nucleus of the cell and in the nucleus of the cell is our DNA. And our DNA is, is sending messages into the cell. Transcription, Right. Messenger rna, but it actually reads our DNA and reads that full of statin DNA and takes, will take the command from both. Yeah, okay, that's really, and make sure I understood that.
- [41:50]
Dr. Matt Cook
And we, you know, I would say this, this one's really early. And so then this, this one, I, it's, it's funny, some friends of mine asked me to fly down to Honduras just to do some vetting of the technology. So I wasn't really planning on doing it, although I'd had a whole bunch of my patients have an incredible experience with it. And I, I told you it in the, I'd had this long experience doing adipose stem cells where we do a liposuction and harvest some stem cells. So I, I show up and the, the doctor who is, is doing the, the study in Honduras is a doctor named Dr. Terry who was who me and him had the same mentor in adipose stem cells.
- [42:42]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [42:43]
Dr. Matt Cook
Bob Alexander.
- [42:44]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [42:44]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then we, so I showed up and I was like, oh my God, I've known this guy for 12 years and is an amazing doctor. And, and so then he walked me through their trial and he, he'd personally treated 250 people and had followed up with them all.
- [43:00]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [43:01]
Dr. Matt Cook
And he hadn't had any negative side effects. There's a, there is a trend for LDL to go up by about 10 points.
- [43:11]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [43:11]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so that's the, about the only negative. But it lengthens telomeres, it decreases biological age. So this is a very big anti inflammatory.
- [43:21]
Gary Brecka
And this is called what?
- [43:22]
Dr. Matt Cook
Full statin.
- [43:23]
Gary Brecka
Oh, full statin. Full statin gene theory does all of this too.
- [43:26]
Dr. Matt Cook
Yeah. So it has a host of benefits that are above and beyond just muscle. So it's a, but particularly anti inflammatory. And then I, I would say that we've had a lot of people emotionally feel better. Wow.
- [43:41]
Gary Brecka
And, and I'm gonna let you guys know how this goes under us. Here we come. You know, I, I, I wanna, I wanna save some time for my, my rule bracket community because we got a lot of questions coming your way for the, for our rule brackets. But I think this, this approach to slowly climbing the ladder from getting your blood work to your genes done to supplementation to fixing your hormones, to then incorporating things like peptides to then climbing into the world of biologic stem cells. Exosomes and gene therapies is the frontier that people are really, really, really curious about. So how can they find out more about you? You written a book?
- [44:25]
Dr. Matt Cook
Because I need to write a book. I need to write a book. But be a bestseller. Where you can find, find you can, you're gonna find me at a bunch of international stem cell clinics.
- [44:37]
Gary Brecka
And stay tuned because I've got some.
- [44:40]
Dr. Matt Cook
We're using, we're using these mu stem cells which I think are going to absolutely transform regenerative medicine. I think so too. And they're the, the most effective stem cells that I've ever found. And we've been doing it for a long time for, for orthopedic and for pain issues. And so. But you can find us@bioreset.com Bioreset.com okay. Yeah. And, and I'm, I'm, I, I promise that I'm gonna actually start doing social media. Yeah.
- [45:15]
Gary Brecka
I mean, it took me a long time too. You know, I barely even have TikTok. I mean, TikTok on my phone. So I, look, I wind down all of my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question, and there's no right or wrong answer to this question, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?
- [45:32]
Dr. Matt Cook
I would say there's two things. One thing is living in the moment, and then the other thing is the arc of what your life and what it means and what you're going to do. And, and so for me, the, and, and these great European philosophers and, and physicians came up with all of these stages of life where you go through basically identity and family and relationships and all this stuff. But then the final stage is generativity, when you give back.
- [46:02]
Gary Brecka
Wow.
- [46:03]
Dr. Matt Cook
And so then, and I always said it, basically everything else doesn't matter. And I basically feel that way. And what really matters is if you can have a meaningful impact that gives back right. To, to, to everyone, to humanity. And so then for me, being an ultimate human is, is actually having an ultimate impact.
- [46:25]
Gary Brecka
Yeah.
- [46:25]
Dr. Matt Cook
And at the same time as that being present and awake and, and being your best version of yourself.
- [46:32]
Gary Brecka
That's incredible, man. That's one of the better that I've heard in a long time. Well, guys, you know how to check out Dr. Matt Cook. I'll put all of the information that he just went through in the show notes below. And as always, that's just science.